tensity which we find in the art of Pergamon
cannot easily be traced to the influence of any similar development in
literature, though its artificial and learned mythology is such as we
find also in the work of Hellenistic poets.

(4) The philosophical aspect of religion had no very great influence
upon art in Greece. We might perhaps expect that, so far as the
philosophers accepted the popular religion, they would tend to purify it
and to give it a higher meaning, just as the more thoughtful of the
poets doubtless assisted the idealising tendency of fifth-century art.
And it might well seem that, for example, Plato's theory of ideas
supplies a more satisfactory basis for an idealist art than any other
system, since it might be maintained that the true artist represents not
the material object which he sees before him, but the ideal prototype of
which it is but a faint and inadequate reflexion. This theory is
peculiarly applicable to statues of the gods, and we find it so applied
by later philosophical and rhetorical writers; for instance, Cicero says
that Phidias "when he was making the statue of Zeus or of Athena did not
derive his image from some individual, but within his own mind there was
a perfect ideal of beauty; and gazing on this and in contemplation of
it, he guided the craft of his hand after its likeness."[4] The same
notion underlies the saying quoted by Strabo, that Phidias was "either
the only man that saw, or the only man that revealed to others the
images of the gods."[5] But there is no trace or encouragement of any
such feeling in the philosophic literature contemporary with the great
age of Greek art. Plato expressly states that the artist only makes "an
imitation of an imitation"; and the higher ideas of divinity preached by
philosophers did not so much tend to ennoble the popular conceptions as
to substitute others for them. Above all, the monotheistic idea, even if
associated with the name of Zeus, tended to become an abstract
conception with little relation to the national god of Hellas, whom
Phidias embodied in his Olympian statue.

[Footnote 4: _Or_. 2. 8.]

[Footnote 5: viii. p. 353. It does not matter whether the passage is
quoted by Strabo himself or by an interpolator.]

The philosophic or theological conception of a monotheistic deity does
not, in fact, seem to lend itself at any time to impressive artistic
representation. We may observe the same thing in Christian art, in which
repre