The visitor will now enter the museum to complete his inspection of
its contents. His way lies once more to the west on entering the great
hall, into the first Sculpture Gallery, or that which he will
recognise as leading into the great central saloon. Here, as he pauses
on the threshold of a noble room filled with splendid specimens of
Greek art, he may recur to the historical points which these works
illustrate. Throughout this, his last visit, he will be occupied with
the examination of the works of the ancient Greeks. These works, as he
will notice, are of various degrees of excellence. Already has he
examined the rude labours of the Greek sculptors of Xanthus; and
to-day his journey will be amid those more modern and perfect labours,
performed when the talent of the Greeks was chiefly concentrated upon
European ground. Although these glories of remote antiquity are here
mostly in an admirable state of preservation, historians are generally
lost in contradictions when they attempt to point to any particular
piece of statuary as the labour of any known sculptor. The sculptor of
the Venus de Medici is not known; and the Apollo Belvedere is a
masterpiece, the author of which lies shrouded in the depths of the
past. Rude and harsh were the early performances of the Greeks. We
have histories of Greek sculptors who flourished many hundred years
before our era; and of these the mythical Daedalus is the oldest and
most renowned. This sculptor is reported to have flourished fourteen
centuries before the Christian era. He is said to have fashioned
colossal wooden statues; and Pausanias mentions his statue of Hercules
in the possession of the Thebans, and his wooden Venus in the
possession of the Delians. His Hercules, however, appears to have been
considered his masterpiece; and Flaxman, commenting upon the antiquity
of the figures of Hercules found on some coins, seems to think that we
may not unreasonably conjecture that these are copies from the
masterpiece of Daedalus. Other sculptors of the same name, appear to
have flourished in the Achaic period of Grecian history. Indeed it is
shrewdly conjectured that Daedalus derived his name from wooden
statues called Daedala; and that amongst the ancient Greeks, Daedalus
meant nothing more than one skilled in making Daedala. The earliest
sculptures of the Greeks were fashioned of materials easily worked, as
plaster, clay, and wood. Later they worked ivory, and began to
understand the value of metals in statuary; and about five centuries
before the Christian era, marble was used by sculptors for detached
figures. In the infancy of Greek art, when sculptors were gradually
acquiring the skill to fashion their creations out of the most durable
material, many combinations of wood, stone, and metal were used, which
would sadly shock the modern sculptor's eye;--wooden figures burnished
with gold, and with painted vermilion faces, were fashioned in the age
of Phidias; and it is believed by some, that this immortal sculptor
helped to produce a statue of Jupiter, the face of which was of ivory
and gold, and the body of gypsum and clay. Phidias may be fairly
acknowledged as the first great Greek sculptor, of whose career and
whose works we have indisputable accounts. He founded, and represents
all the excellencies of the highest school of Greek art. The sculptors
who came after him, as Lysippus the favourite of the great Alexander,
paid greater regard to graces of detail and to finish; but of those
sublime effects, those forms of gods in human shape which really
impress the modern spectator with their almost superhuman beauty,
Phidias was the creator. The sculptures known to the public as the
Townley collection, are sculptures generally of a more modern date
than those in the Elgin and Phigaleian Saloons. The collection has
undoubtedly many specimens of the rudest eras of Greek art: but its
most striking groups, to the general visitor, will be undoubtedly
those finished statues and compositions which represent the ages when
Greece was a great European power, and that subsequent period when the
Greek sculptors plied their chisels under the patronage of Roman
conquerors. In this room the visitor will once more remark, how large
a proportion of these priceless relics have been gleaned from ancient
sepulchres. Even as he enters the room, he may perceive on the right,
the front of a tomb from Athens, carved in high relief; and on the
left, the front of another tomb, also sculptured, from Delos.
The room is divided into compartments which the visitor should examine
in their regular order of rotation. He will begin therefore, of course
with the