Two Fourth Century Children's Heads

It is commonly supposed that the treatment of children in the finest period of Greek sculpture is a subject that can be very lightly dismissed. Children, it is said, are not represented in Greek art before Hellenistic times—not represented, that is to say, with any truth to nature or reproduction of the characteristics of childhood. Of course it is never denied that young children appear in statues or reliefs of the fifth or fourth centuries; but when they so appear, they are said to be treated carelessly, conventionally, with no regard to their proper forms or proportions, but just as men on a smaller scale. This assertion is on the whole a correct one. Of careless treatment the infant Dionysus carried by the Hermes of Praxiteles is an example; the child is regarded merely as an accessory, and the execution is in marked contrast to the extreme finish and delicacy of work which we see in the Hermes himself. Even where there is no such contrast in the execution, a conventional treatment may often be seen, as in the case of children on grave-monuments and elsewhere. Nor are one or two children in sculptural groups belonging in origin to the fourth century to be regarded as exceptions (for instance, the infant Plutus carried by the Eirene of Cephisodotus); for these only survive in later copies, and in them the child is modified to suit the requirements of a later period, when children had been studied with as much care as had been spent upon the mature figure by the sculptor of the original group.