* * * * *

Passing over a long space of time we come to our next illustration, the Apollo Belvedere (Fig. 6).

It might seem that here at last we have nothing primitive; here we have art pure and simple, ideal art utterly cut loose from ritual, “art for art’s sake.”  Yet in this Apollo Belvedere, this product of late and accomplished, even decadent art, we shall see most clearly the intimate relation of art and ritual; we shall, as it were, walk actually across that transition bridge of ritual which leads from actual life to art.

[Illustration:  Fig. 6.  The Apollo Belvedere.]

The date of this famous Apollo cannot be fixed, but it is clearly a copy of a type belonging to the fourth century B.C.  The poise of the figure is singular and, till its intent is grasped, unsatisfactory.  Apollo is caught in swift motion but seems, as he stands delicately poised, to be about to fly rather than to run.  He stands tiptoe and in a moment will have left the earth.  The Greek sculptor’s genius was all focussed, as we shall presently see, on the human figure and on the mastery of its many possibilities of movement and action.  Greek statues can roughly be dated by the way they stand.  At first, in the archaic period, they stand firmly planted with equal weight on either foot, the feet close together.  Then one foot is advanced, but the weight still equally divided, an almost impossible position.  Next, the weight is thrown on the right foot; and the left knee is bent.  This is of all positions the loveliest for the human body.  We allow it to women, forbid it to men save to “aesthetes.”  If the back numbers of Punch be examined for the figure of “Postlethwaite” it will be seen that he always stands in this characteristic relaxed pose.

When the sculptor has mastered the possible he bethinks him of the impossible.  He will render the human body flying.  It may have been the accident of a mythological subject that first suggested the motive.  Leochares, a famous artist of the fourth century B.C., made a group of Zeus in the form of an eagle carrying off Ganymede.  A replica of the group is preserved in the Vatican, and should stand for comparison near the Apollo.  We have the same tiptoe poise, the figure just about to leave the earth.  Again, it is not a dance, but a flight.  This poise is suggestive to us because it marks an art cut loose, as far as may be, from earth and its realities, even its rituals.

What is it that Apollo is doing?  The question and suggested answers have occupied many treatises.  There is only one answer:  We do not know.  It was at first thought that the Apollo had just drawn his bow and shot an arrow.  This suggestion was made to account for the pose; but that, as we have seen, is sufficiently explained by the flight-motive.  Another possible solution is that Apollo brandishes in his uplifted hand the aegis, or goatskin shield, of Zeus.  Another suggestion is that he holds as often a lustral, or laurel bough, that he is figured as Daphnephoros, “Laurel-Bearer.”