The sixth lamp of Greek art is _Patience_ in striving after perfection.
In the finer work of Greek sculptors one finds an utterly ungrudging
expenditure of time and care which reminds one of the working of
Nature herself, Nature who is never in a hurry, who is never contented
with a hasty sketch, but works regardless of time. We are told of
Protogenes that he spent seven years on a single figure, and I think he
would have spent seven more if he had thought that he could thereby have
improved his painting. Nothing strikes one more strongly in such works
as the charioteer of Delphi and the Hermes of Praxiteles than the pains
taken with every detail. It is by careful work, continued through
successive generations, that sculpture attained such mastery in the
representation of the muscles of the body as we find in the Borghese
fighting figure of the Louvre, and such delicacy in the rendering of
drapery as we find in the Victories of the Balustrade at Athens, or the
Victory of Samothrace.
But the delicacy and minuteness of Greek work is of course most obvious
in the reliefs of coins and in gems. The coins were not primarily meant
to please the eye, but to circulate in the fish-market; yet a multitude
of the dies are so exquisitely finished that they lose little when
magnified to many diameters, and will bear the most critical
examination. The intaglio gems were meant for the sealing of documents,
the seal taking the place of the modern signature; but the figures upon
seals are in their way as finished as great works of sculpture. Seals
even more usually than coins gain rather than lose if they are enlarged.
Yet they were executed without the help of magnifying glasses. Their
subjects are taken from the widest field, the figures of deities, tales
from mythology, portraits, animal forms; like the coins they introduced
as an undercurrent to the prosaic life of every day an element of poetry
and imagination.