Excerpt from A Handbook of Greek Sculpture

Dedications was the colossal Apollo at Delos. At the rival shrine of Delphi they also set up one of the most conspicuous of all the monuments, and this has happily been recovered in an almost complete state by the French excavators. It consists of a colossal sphinx, mounted on an Ionic column of peculiar early form; this was placed just above the rock of the Sibyl, in front of the platform on which the temple stood. The sphinx, to which we are accustomed as a symbol over a tomb, is doubt less meant here as an allusion to the oracle. The statue itself offers another example of an attempt we have seen already in various works of archaic art - the attempt to reproduce in marble on a large scale a motive taken from minute decorative art. And here, because the scale is colossal, the process is more difficult and its defects are more conspicuous. We see, as in a small bronze, the back-curved wings, the indication of plumage on them and on the breast, and other conventional features of the smaller treatment. But the large scale of the face has evidently been too much for the sculptor. Here, as in the Hera of Olympia, we see the thin waves of hair over the forehead, the flat eye-balls with merely incised lids, the straight mouth with thin lips, and the blankness of expression which contrasts strongly with the exaggerated grimace of many archaic faces. It is the same timid, indecisive style that we have seen elsewhere in works associated with Samos and with Boeotia; it is instructive to find another example belonging to Naxos, for it shows us that the early Attic series of female statues, which are by many associated with influence from the islands, and especially from Chios, by no means represents a style that is characteristic of the Aegean islands. But, apart from its defects of detail, the boldness of design of this sphinx on its lofty column shows us the vigour of the Naxian sculptors, who did not shrink from the great difficulties of execution and transport which a work on such a scale must imply.

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