Down by the sands, where the midland sea surges and draws off its feeble
tides, and the sheltering beaches, the delight of antique mariners,
tempt straying ruminants with their salt herbage, and no voracious
spring-tide floods the beach, I made my first positive acquaintance with
the _Scarabaeus pilularius_, and guessed at the mystery of his worship in
those Eastern lands where sand and sun are the rulers, and he their
chief subject. Wonderful in his knowledge of statics and dynamics I
found him; heroic in fight and magnanimous in victory, as ungrudging in
his acceptance of defeat; and altogether a creature of rare and
wonderful instincts.
A line of tracks, so similar to hieroglyphics as to justify an
initiatory reverence in a Cadmian mind, drawn indefinitely across the
smooth-spread yellow sand, led me, curious, to the arena of his
achievements. A dozen similar tracks led from different directions,
converging to a pile of dung, and here half a dozen Scarabaei, of as many
sizes, were cutting and carving, and every now and then another came
buzzing up from the leeward, flying in the eye of the wind, and dropped
heavily on the sand, ready to make one of the busy crowd. I selected as
subject of my observations the largest, a fellow of prodigious
proportions and exemplary industry. He had commenced the excavation of a
mass of the pilulary, making a circular cut downwards, and was half
buried in the fosse which was to isolate a sufficient fragment. Round
and round he went in a perfect arc, cutting deeper and deeper until he
reached the sand below and the separation was complete. He traversed it
to and fro, time after time, to be sure that the cut was direct and
absolute; then, bracing his head against the sand foundation, he began
pushing with his hind legs to move off the selected portion. I thought
to help him, and carefully pushed it with a small reed until it rolled
over on the sand, and he with it, innocuously hoist by his own petard.
Finding himself free on the level sand, he commenced to roll and round
it, kneading the irregularities back and dragging upwards at the same
time with his fore feet, so that in less than a minute after his
liberation he had worked his lump into a close approximation to globular
form, and had started on his voyage; but after a few turns he stopped,
seemed to try the weight of his load, deliberately rolled it back into
its original bed, and then began to excavate another portion, which he
set himself to work into the original ball, which when weighed had been
found wanting. The surface of the latter was thoroughly sanded by its
revolutions, and adhesion was impossible; so he began working the new
material under the coating of sand in so dexterous a way that he quickly
completed the integration, and at the same time restored the globular
form to the whole; then he started anew, to roll it off to its future
depository.
The worst of his mechanical difficulties was overcome; but now began a
series of struggles with Scarabaei unprovided with the objects of
beetling ambition, and whose education seemed to have stopped at the
days when power and possession were words nearer their root and each
other than now,--when to justify piracy you must organize some sort of
government.
I recognized in the deportment of these rovers of the sands another
claim to the reverence of the early ages of human civilization,--another
reason for their canonization by the Egyptians, in whose calendar is
mentioned St. Scarabaeus. For the moment any wandering and pilless
Scarabaeus met the hero of my story he made an examination of the size
and general perfections of his work, going up the side opposite to that
on which its lawful owner had established his motive power; and, as the
bolus was at least a dozen times the size of its owner, he sometimes
took a considerable ramble before he met that important individual. But
they no sooner met than the tug of war began. They fought like Ajax and
Hector for the dead body of Patroclus. They clenched, wrestled,
struggled, pushed, until the stronger got uppermost, when he employed
all his remaining force to push the other off and keep him down. If
nearly matched, sometimes the under one got a shoulder-lock on his
adversary, and, by an Herculean effort, threw him over his head, and to
a distance of two or three inches across the sand. This usually
terminated the battle, and the whipped Scarabaeus made his way off as
rapidly as his legs would carry him. If the Scarabaeus in possession
could keep the other off the ball for a few seconds, the latter gave up
the struggle and sought his fortunes on another field.
I had wisely chosen my hero so strong that there was little fear of his
being ousted; so my sympathies were on the winning side. But once he met
his master, and was pitched with terrific violence across the sand,
striking on his head, to his evident stupefaction. When he recovered he
gave up his property without demur, and started for another venture.
Then I, the _deus ex machina_, stepped into the epic, pitched the
usurper three times as far as he had thrown my friend, then rolled the
"apple of discord" directly in the path of its rightful owner, and saw
him commencing his task anew, with unabated energy. A little declivity
stood in his way, and it was a Sysiphus-labor to get beyond it. Time
after time, poising himself squarely and solidly on his head, and
bracing himself after the manner of equestrian performers by his
superior extremities, he walked backwards, pushing the ball before him,
and gingerly meeting the tendency to escape, first on one side, and then
on the other; finally, missing, it rolled down the whole slope, carrying
him in dizzy revolutions with it; but without hesitation he recommenced
his work undiscouraged.
Some I saw who seemed to have partners in their toils,--a smaller,
demurer-looking Scarabaeus,--working side by side and in peace with the
greater originator, to get their burden into some quiet spot. What their
relations were, and what they wanted to do with bolus, I don't know, and
doubt if the wisest man in the court of the first of the Pharaohs did.
Whether the Scarabaei are a nation of Amazons, and the hero I had chosen
was a heroine, or whether the lesser partner was a patient waiter for
conjugal content and the fruition of marital hopes, I of course can't
tell. Perhaps Agassiz or Wyman could, but Moses, I am sure, couldn't;
and as what he knew of the _Scarabaeus pilularius_ lies behind all he is
to me in connection with my present subject of dissertation, I take the
beetle from the Pharaonic point of view, and, looking over all I know of
the reasons for reverence, and for being cut in stone, I make them
these:--
Firstly, he was a scavenger, and the wise men taught the people to
respect him as a means of preserving the race undiminished. The common
people have always a profound contempt for the beings who do their dirty
work, and contempt with them goes before enmity. In this the Egyptians
would only show that they were a Southern people, and so had much dirty
work to do. And in this connection I must say, that I consider that, an
undeveloped people not being awake to fine distinctions, and being
predisposed to despise everything differing from themselves, we must
attribute all the respect paid the _Scarabaeus pilularius_ to the advice
and influence of their wise men, who, so long as they _were_ wise, would
persuade them to protect every useful creature.
Secondly, the mechanical instincts of the _Scarabaeus pilularius_ must
have always excited the interest of the geometers and mechanists at a
time when geometry and mechanics were known in their simplest elements
mainly, and considered the marvellous secrets of creation. The absolute
rotundity of the pedifacture of the insect must have seemed the result
of a sense little less than preternatural, to people who were not
accustomed to reason away all recognition of the preternatural. But that
which was wonderful to me, the power of weighing so accurately the load
he was to propel, must have been not a little amazing to them, less
familiar than we have become, through subsequent researches in natural
history, with the powers of the brute creation.
Thirdly, that the _Scarabaeus pilularius_ was a soldier and hero was less
noteworthy in those days than in modern times; for then he was no man
who was no soldier, and to be brave was only a human virtue, but was
still marvellous in an insect.
And, if last, not least of the claims of our friend to reverence was the
strange line of hieroglyph he left on the _tabula rasa_ sea-washed, in
column like the message written down an obelisk; and that the most high
priest had no key to the cipher only made it more curious and more
revered.
I do not know that anything so simple ever impressed me more strangely
than the meeting for the first time on the solitary sands of Antium,
amid thoughts of Egypt's queen and her sad loves, this line of curious
figures, sand-written. And who shall say that the original Cadmus was
not our Pilularius? Certainly he left a record of the life he led, and
the journeys he took, long before the first emigration from the
flood-fertilized lands around Thebes-on-Nile carried civilization into
northern lands.
It may have been from this trick of his of writing on the sand that they
took his image for the signet; or perhaps it was only that the broad
under-surface of the stone or smalt of which they made the Scarabaeus was
too tempting to be left vacant, and the portable shape and size of the
stone gave it the preference over the images of crocodile or cat. Be
that as it may, it became the form universal for signets, and bore the
monogram or polygram of kings unnumbered and of chiefs unknown, so that
the fictle Scarabaeus doubtless carries to-day more strange messages for
us than did the great original to his first observers. Being as ignorant
of what hieroglyphs tell as the man who died when Champollion was born,
I do not venture a conjecture on the significance or value of the
"cartouches" inscribed on the plane surface of the Scarabaeus. There can
be no doubt that they were tokens of rank, and mainly bore direct
reference to the history or condition of the wearer, with occasional
mystic sentences, perhaps serving at once as signet and amulet.
My purpose, however, is to treat only of certain artistic relations, and
to me, therefore, the Egyptian Scarabaeus is only of value as it leads
to, and is connected with, the Etruscan. The former is utterly
unartistic,--a rude, but tolerably accurate imitation of the _Scarabaeus
pilularius_, the specific character being sufficiently developed,--the
whole value of the work, both in its figure and the incisions under it,
being evidently in its significance, and all conditions required of it
being sufficiently answered by intelligibility. This is, indeed,
characteristic of all Egyptian so-called art. It is not art at all, it
is only writing; and the transfer of the Scarabaeus from Egypt to Etruria
only forms another evidence of the inevitable antithesis existing
between art and record. The identical types which on the Nile told the
same story age after age, unchanging in their form as in their meaning,
once in the hands of the Etruscan, entered on a course of refinement and
artistic development into objects of beauty; but in this they entirely
lost sight of their original meaning. This is strikingly the case with
the Scarabaeus which, under the hands of the Etruscan cutter, lost at
once all specific character. He might be Scarabaeus anything: he is not
_pilularius_; and, instead of being made of basalt, porphyry, smalt, and
very rarely of _pietra dura_, as in Egypt, he is engraved in carnelian,
onyx, sardonyx, and all the rare and lovely varieties of _pietra
dura_,--which, being essentially the same, change their names with
their colors,--but mainly in an opaque carnelian, admirably calculated
to show off the beauty of the workmanship. The change from use to
ornament is abrupt, and perceivable in the earliest Etruscan examples,
and proves conclusively to me two disputed points; namely, that the
_Scarabaeus pilularius_ and his allied notions came from Egypt to
Etruria, and that the Etruscan and Egyptian races were utterly diverse
in origin and antithetic in intellectual character. The eminent
utilitarianism of the latter leaves no room for purely artistic effort,
while the former literally _non tetiget quod non ornavit_. Even the
pictorial and sculptural representations of the Egyptians were
absolutely subservient to history or worship; but the Etruscans cared so
little for their own history as to leave us almost no inscribed
monuments, though the remains of their taste and skill stand side by
side with what we have of Greek work. They seem, indeed, to have been a
more absolutely artistic people even than the Greeks, in whom art was
exalted by a certain union with intellectual culture, the result of
which was, of course, a larger growth and nobler ideal than the more
ornamental Etrurian mind could attain. This points to an Eastern origin
more in kinship with the Persian than the Greek, and to-day only
illustrated by the Persian ornamentation.
The Scarabaeus then, instead of the rude, straightforward representation
of the Egyptian workman, assumes a more elegant form, with elaborate
sculpture of all the insect characteristics, the edges of the wings and
the lines that divide them from the chest being exquisitely beaded and
wrought, and the claws being relieved and modelled with the highest care
and most artistic finish. The form of the image, in fact, generally
resembles more the beautiful green beetle which I have often caught in
the mountains around Rome, than his plebeian and utilitarian cousin, the
_Scarabaeus pilularius_. The contour of the stone beneath the Scarabaeus
proper is markedly distinguished from the insect portion, and ornamented
with a relieved cornice, more or less elaborate according to the general
finish of the stone. I have one in which this cornice of .073 inch in
width contains an upper and a lower bead and a U moulding of which the
parts are only one fourth the height of the cornice in breadth, and yet
are cut with mathematical regularity and completeness. The bead that
marks the junction of the wings and chest is divided into squares of
.0045 inch in dimension. If this care is given to the less important
part of the stone, what may we not expect from the intaglii which make
the more important objects of the lapidary's work! A stone, three
fourths of an inch in length, contains two full-length figures seated in
conversational attitudes, the extended hand of one of which, with the
thumb and four fingers perfectly defined, is only .063 inch in length.
The great inequality between the power of design and the executive skill
and taste in mere ornamentation in the characteristic Etruscan work is
comparable only to those Eastern products which I have before alluded
to,--the Persian fabrics. The animals are drawn without any regard to
anatomical or optical truth,--foreshortening taken by a royal road, and
grace thrown overboard. The hog is generally shown as flatted out, the
legs appearing two on each side of the body; and the members of all
animals are stowed away with more direct reference to composition of
masses than of animal organisms. I remember one of a horse, in which,
there not being room for the four legs in their natural places, one was
hung up at the side where a vacant space offered itself.
The earliest work seems to be done by a graving process, as if cutting
were by lines; the later is evidently done by the drilling operation now
in use, and the process is much more apparent, especially in the
drill-like terminations. This was probably owing to the use of the
diamond itself for the incision, instead of the steel point and diamond
dust, as in modern times, and to the great difficulty in getting a point
on the implement.
The purely ornamental manner of treating the Scarabaeus seems to indicate
that it had neither religious nor historical value. Had the contrary
been the case, we should inevitably have found some artistic quality
sacrificed to their meaning, which is not the case with the intaglio
more than with the insect representation. The subjects include all the
objects known to familiar life, with all the incidents of martial
experience,--horses, chariots, arms,--warriors wounded, defeated, dying,
victorious, struggling. One I remember of a surgeon dressing the wound
of a warrior, who throws up his hands in expression of the pain he
suffers; another, of the Genius of Death coming to Hercules; another
still, of two winged genii burying a warrior; one, of two warriors
dividing the dead body of a third, etc., etc. The style of cutting
gradually changes, probably under the influence of Greek artists,--who
are known to have emigrated to Etruria from Corinth, exiled by their
native tyrants,--and becomes quite Greek in delicacy of finish and grace
of proportion; and the subject becomes almost entirely of Greek history
or mythology,--the heroes of the Trojan war figuring largely.
Some of these are the perfection of intaglio: nothing in the gem-cutting
of the Greeks could be more exquisite and purely beautiful than they are
_as intaglio_. Yet, excellent as is the work, there is an essential
difference between the Etruscan and Greek design, which no similarity of
workmanship will ever conceal,--a difference as radical as that between
Roman and Greek sculpture, and still more marked. The Etruscan, in its
highest artistic development, preserves something of an Oriental fantasy
and want of repose, and invariably falls short of the dignified and
purely imaginative character of the Greek. It makes no exception to this
rule, that there are Etruscan Scarabaei which have purely Greek intaglii,
since we know that there were Greek artists of the highest rank among
those who emigrated to Etruria, and that it was customary for one
workman to make the Scarabaeus, and another the incision. But these are
rare, and the trained eye of an artist need not be more puzzled to
determine the Greek or Etruscan character of an intaglio, than to
distinguish a Florentine picture from a Venetian. The difference is
radical,--that between the objective and subjective art,--between an
Indian shawl and a bit of drapery by Paul Veronese.
As to the uses of the Scarabaeus, we may be sure that they were at first
intended as signets and mounted as rings in the simple and charming way
of which we find so many examples in the Etruscan tombs, each end of a
gold wire being passed through the perforated Scarabaeus, and the
extremities secured by being wound round the wire at the opposite side
of the stone. As soon as they become mere ornaments, a more elaborate
mounting is seen on those worn as rings; and they appear in bracelets,
necklaces, etc., in such profusion and confusion of subject, and style
and date of workmanship, as to show plainly that they had lost all
superstitious value or personal significance, and had become, like
diamonds and pearls, a part of the gold-worker's material.
What the wealth and luxuriousness of those cities, now more deeply
buried than Thebes or Nineveh, must have been, we can only imagine from
the few traditions preserved by Roman historians,--grudging the glory of
rivals so long and masters so often, though finally subjects of the
irresistible force of crescent empire,--and from the gold-work known
after so many centuries of sepulture. We know that Porsenna built
himself a tomb in the solid rock,--a labyrinth whose secret no searchers
of modern times have yet found, though they have burrowed around Clusium
like marmots; and that over this he raised himself a monument,--five
towers of stone, on the top of which was laid a domed platform of brass,
and above this still towers and other brass, and higher yet, towers and
a crowning bronze dome; and that from the edges of all these platforms
hung thousands of bells, rung by the sea-breeze which every midday came
up, and still comes, across the low Etrurian hills, to find the children
she wafted from the land of the Parsee and Chaldee. It is hard to define
a "civilization"; and we talk of the ages of gold and of bronze as if we
knew the history of the whole world and its generations; but to me the
few glimpses I get through the crevices of the ages that hide Etruria,
as the hills of the Black Forest hide the fairies from the German child,
indicate an age more fitting the epithet Golden than any since, and a
nation the like of which, as of the good-folk, we shall see no more on
earth. There were confederation without over-centralization; states side
by side, without mutual hate or subjugation; wealth and power, without
the corruption that destroys nations; and military prowess, without the
unscrupulous ambition that cannot live and let live. They were
instructors of Rome in all that Rome knew of civilization; many times
masters of the imperial city, without ever envying it its existence;
mild conquerors, and just lawgivers; and the City of the Seven Hills
owed to the proximity of her seven Etrurian sisters all her early wisdom
in politics, all her knowledge of the arts which refine and preserve;
and to their love of those arts, and of the peace in which they
flourish, the permission of her existence in those early centuries which
preceded the fall of Veii.
It is not here the place to develop the moral of Etruscan history, or to
investigate the political and social condition of the Etruscan people;
though the links we have of the former, and the glimpses of the latter
seen athwart the prejudices and mortified pride of the Roman historians,
give the subject a fascinating interest. It is said that when the Roman
armies invaded the territory of the northern Etruscan states, and their
commander asked the name of the first city they approached, the
unsuspecting subject of the Lars replied only,--not understanding the
barbarian language,--[Greek: Chaire], "Hail!" and ever since the city
has been known as Caere (and to its present inhabitants as
Cerevetere,--_Caere vetus_). Until the fatal dissension which permitted
the Romans to conquer Veii, the Etruscan states calmly and steadily
repelled all invasion,--rarely, as in the time of Porsenna, turning
aside to retaliate on Rome,--and still pursued their peaceful career,
the sages of Egypt and the artists and poets of Greece giving wisdom and
grace to their daily lives,--their temples the richest, their domestic
life the fairest, their political condition the most prosperous, and
their commerce the widest of all Italy, if not of all Europe.
Of it all, we have only the grave into which art sought to carry an
immortality of its own, and from which religion strove to banish the
drear gloom of the uncertain by surrounding the dead with all the
objects familiar to their daily lives and the incidents which were the
most antagonistic in impression to the darkness and silence to which
they abandoned the beloved ones only when conquest and destruction had
concealed the portals of their tombs, and ancestor and descendant had
yielded to the same oblivion. Among the most interesting tombs at
Tarquinii is one painted round with a wedding feast, the bridegroom
kissing his bride, the wine-cups and garlands, the dance and song with
the timing pipes, in colors fresh and sharp to-day amid the grave-damps,
giving the challenge strangely to the all-destroyer. One much later in
style of decoration has a procession of spirits driven by two
demons,--Dantesque in power and simplicity of conception and evident
faith, but telling a stranger story, in its contrast with the former,
than anything we know in the history of the time,--a change from the
golden to the iron days of Etruria.
The marvellous treasures of these tombs,--though only the few which, by
comparative insignificance or fortunate accident, have escaped the
unintelligent ravage of Roman or of Goth,--are like the scale or bone of
Agassiz's saurian; and a necklace of Scarabaei alternated with the
little pendent fantasies in gold, which we may see in the Campana
collection, is the fragment from which we build Etruria, taking a little
help from the time-defying walls, and a hint from the sarcophagus whose
mutually embracing effigies of the two made one tell that position given
to woman which made Rome what she was after the fraud of Romulus gave to
Romans Etruscan wives.
The Etrurians were the gold-workers of all time. Like shawls of
Cashmere, Greek statuary, Gothic architecture, and Saracenic tracery,
Etruscan gold-work stands absolutely alone,--the result of an artistic
instinct deeper than any rules or any instruction, and therefore not to
be improved or repeated. It is characterized by the most subtile and
lovely use of decorative masses and lines,--not for representation or
imitation, which are not motives to enter into pure ornament, but for
the highest effect of beautiful form and rich color, without giving the
eye or mind any associative or intellectual suggestion. The vice of all
modern ornamentation is, that it insists on mixing natural history with
decoration. It cannot avoid preaching, as fairy stories now-a-days
cannot stop without a moral for good children, and consequently is, like
them, stupid and unreal. The best ornamentation is that which is
farthest from imitation; and that, in gold-work, is the Etruscan. As we
had occasion to say in the preceding pages, the Scarabaeus marks the
difference between the moralizing Egyptian mind and the beauty-loving
Etruscan. And if we might point a moral in an article defiant of morals,
it would be in comparing the black, blood-stained history of Egypt with
the fair record of the Larthian people. Beauty is its own moral and its
own redeemer, and a mind that loves it may be corrupted to decay, but
cannot be led into brutality or sunk into obscurity. Of the magnificence
of the living people we can scarcely judge, since all we have now is the
gorgeous array of those who were robed for the eternal rest. Castellani,
in his pamphlet on the antique gold-work (_Dell' Oreficeria Antica,
Discorso di August Castellani_), says: "But the excavations of Etruria
which have preserved, what with pictures, apparel, and fabrics, so many
of the antique sacerdotal ornaments, add almost nothing to the little we
know about the names and uses of them. Micali says that 'the mechanism
of the whole Etruscan government was beyond doubt priestly in its
institutions.' After such a declaration by one of the most accurate
narrators of ancient Italian history, I should scarcely know what to add
to convey an idea of the pomp in which the priestly class of Etruria
lived and robed itself. We can conjecture that the great poitrel in the
Etruscan museum in the Vatican, the two magnificent bridles of the
Campana museum, all the collars of extraordinary size and the large
bullae of various forms and dimensions which come from the various
collections, and the innumerable vases, paterae, cups, and goblets of
gold, silver, and bronze found in the sepulchres, were all implements,
furniture, and ornaments devoted to the service of religion. And such a
multitude of objects may give some indication both of the multiplicity
of the mysteries and sacred functions, and of the treasures which must
have been contained in the antique temples, plundered by the barbarians,
and then destroyed by the intolerant zeal of ignorant disciples of a
new, triumphant religion."
What the wealth of the favored Etruscan fanes must have been may be
conjectured from the fact that Dionysius carried from one on the
sea-coast treasures to the amount of $40,000,000.
Of the gold-working, Castellani's restorations and imitations will give
us a tolerable idea, so far as workmanship is concerned, though he
himself confesses to be unable to equal all its qualities. I translate
an interesting passage.
"Having proposed to ourselves, then, to restore as far as we could, and,
so to speak, to renew the antique gold-work, we first set ourselves to
search for the methods which the ancients must have used. It was
observed that in the ornaments of gold all the parts in relief were by
the ancients superimposed; that is to say, prepared separately and then
placed in position by means of soldering or some chemical process, and
not raised by stamping, casting, or chiselling. From this arises,
perhaps, the something spontaneous, the freedom and artistic neglect
which is seen in the works of the ancients, which appear all made by
hands guided by thought, while the moderns impress, I would say, a
certain perfect exactness on the things produced by them, which reveals
the work of mechanical implements, and shows a want of the creative
thought of the artist. Here, then, they sought to find means to compose
and solder together so many pieces of gold of different forms, and of
such minuteness, that, as we have said, it goes to the very extreme.
"We made innumerable experiments, and put in operation successively all
the chemical agents, many metallic alloys, and the most powerful fluxes.
We searched the writings of Pliny, of Theophilus, and of Cellini; the
works of the Indian gold-workers and those of Genoa and of Malta were
studied with all care; in short, there was forgotten no one of those
sources whence we might hope for some hint. Finally, whence least we
expected it came some real assistance.
"Hidden in the highest mountains of the Apennine range is a little town
called St. Angelo in Vado, where are made gold and silver ornaments,
with which the fair mountaineers decorate themselves. Here it appears
that they preserve, at least in part, the oldest traditions of the art
of working in gold and silver; and these workmen,... shut, so to speak,
from all contact with modern things, make crowns of filigree strung with
gilded pearls and ear-rings of that peculiar form which is called the
'navicella,' by such methods as perhaps the antique were made, so that
these jewels resemble not a little those found in the Greek and Etruscan
sepulchres, although for elegance of form and for taste they are far
from equalling them....
"Not long since, when, examining with a lens the Etruscan jewels of our
own collection, I discerned in the zones of the tiny grains (which are
characteristic of the work of these patient artists) certain defects,
such as those which are made in enamel by the melting of the gold. These
observations suggested to me to try a new process, in order to reproduce
this exceedingly fine grain-work, believed hitherto impossible to be
even distantly imitated by modern gold-workers. I immediately commenced
the new experiments, and the results were sufficiently satisfactory to
enable me to say, at present, that the problem is nearly solved which
for almost twenty years has defied us."
And even now Castellani's best grain-work is far from equalling in
delicacy and perfection of workmanship some of the antiques in his own
collection.
Our Scarabaeus has got into magnificent company, and modern taste finds
that he deserved it; and certainly, _me judice_, nothing can be more
purely artistic than a fine Scarabaeus, and the fascination that comes
over whoever has ventured to dabble in that kind of wares is as
dangerous as the chances of play. Be content with a single one! If you
once get into comparison, you have abandoned yourself to the witchery of
the unknown and unattainable perfection.
Engraved gems or simple intaglios in _pietra dura_ seem to belong to
Greek art rather than Etruscan. The style of finishing the stone was
more in accordance with the simple and elegant ideal of the Greek
intellect. The intaglio was all to the Greek artist, and anything more
was labor worse than wasted. His intaglio ceased to be ornamentation,
and passed into the category of ideal work. And there are intaglii of
Greek workmanship which are as lovely as it is possible to conceive
anything,--all the spirit and perfect proportion of the antique
sculpture concentrated in an oval, an inch by three quarters of an
inch, executed with a delicacy which defies the naked eye to measure it!
A critical study of gems is an affair of years; yet, so far as all
principles of design are concerned or characteristics of art, we may
always consider the intaglii with the sculpture of the same epoch. The
spirit and manner and perfections are the same. The first are, of
course, the Greek; and a fine example is rarely found,--heads only, of
Dioscorides or any equally famous artist, being valued at from $400 to
$800, and even $1200 in the case of the Ariadne. The next in value are
Etruscan, very fine examples being nearly as much esteemed as Greek,
while the best Roman is, like Roman sculpture, but a far-off emulation
in design, though often admirable in execution and finish. Very fine
examples of either are not largely current, being taken up by collectors
and consigned at once to public or private cabinets; but now and then
one turns up, or is turned up by an unenterprising share-holder of the
Campagna of Rome, or by some excavator or vineyard-digger in Sicily,
Magna Graecia, or Greece proper, and, if it gets into commerce, finds its
way generally to Rome, the centre of exchange for classical antiquities.
The Scarabaei are mostly found in the Etruscan tombs, and occasionally
outside the walls of the Etruscan cities,--swept out, may be, with the
antique dust. But there are Roman imitations, made doubtless for some
aristocratic descendant of the mythic Etrurian kings, like Maecenas,
proud of that remote if subjugated ancestry, and looking wistfully
backward to the Arcadia of which his family traditions only preserved
the record. The Roman lapidaries were not nice workmen, and their
imitations are most palpable.
Then, in the fifteenth century, came other and better lapidaries, and of
better taste, many of whose Scarabaei are of great value, though still
not difficult to distinguish from the Etruscan, when we study the
design. The modern demand for them has produced innumerable impositions
in the shape of copies,--poor Scarabaei retouched to fine ones, still
bearing the marks of antiquity, and others whose under surface, being
originally left blank, is engraved by the hired workmen of the modern
Roman antiquaries, by whom they are sold as guaranteed antiques. This is
the most common and dangerous cheat, and one which the easy conscience
of the Italian merchant regards as perfectly justifiable; for has not
the stone all the aroma of antiquity? A little shade darker in iniquity
is the selling of stones entirely recut from broken larger ones, so
that, though the stone remains identical, the workman puts a new face on
it; and even this the antiquary will sell you as a veritable antique.
Then there is the unmitigated swindle of the pure imitation, oftentimes
so perfect that the most experienced judges are deceived. There is in
fact no absolute certainty in the matter. There are antiques of which no
doubt can be entertained, with characteristics utterly inimitable; but
there are others as certainly antique which have none of these, but,
taken without reference to their _placer_, are not to be distinguished
with absolute certainty. I remember a necklace in the Campana museum,
which, in a large number of unmistakable Scarabaei, had one for which I
would not have paid two scudi on the Piazza Navona, so like the modern
imitations did it look. The only reliable criterion for the majority of
cases is the spirit of the design in the intaglio. Castellani says:
"Antique Etruscan, Greek, or Roman Scarabaei are at present very rare,
and their high price tempts the moderns to counterfeit them. And to such
a perfection have they carried their business that it is with difficulty
the best-trained eye can discover the fraud. It is not the stone, not
the polish, nor even the incision, but a peculiar smoothness and
_morbidezza_, which distinguishes the antique; and which only they who
for many years have studied such kinds of work, or who, either in the
way of trade or otherwise, have seen and handled many of the gems, are
able to perceive."
A friend in Rome came to me one day with a request that I would go with
him to see a Scarabaeus which he had taken a fancy to, and had engaged to
buy if it were counted genuine by good judges. It was a superb stone, a
deep carnelian, nearly opaque, exquisitely elaborated, and with an
intaglio which I doubt not was Greek. It was the most beautiful one I
had ever seen, and I gave my opinion, such as it was, in favor of its
antiquity. It was purchased, and afterwards shown to a well-known
dealer, by whom it was pronounced a cheat; and on inquiry it was
discovered that the seller had had a copy made of the original, and,
while he offered the latter for sale, delivered the former, which was so
carefully and perfectly copied as to puzzle the eye even of the
best-instructed amateur.
A merchant of antiquities with whom I have occasional dealings--we will
call him A. because that is not his initial--brought me one day a large
intaglio, which had the appearance of an archaic Etruscan work. A. is
known as one of the _piu cognoscenti_ of Rome; and his dictum is worth
any other two. He declared it an original antique of the rarest quality;
and Odelli, the best gem-cutter in Rome, coincided in the opinion. He
held it at two thousand francs, but would have sold it to me for
eighteen hundred, I suppose. I didn't bite, and after a few weeks lured
the collector of whom he had bought it--one of those who make it a
business to haunt the markets, and visit distant cities and excavations,
to purchase and sell again to the Roman antiquaries--to boast his
prowess as compared with that of A., who had bitten him severely
several times in their dealings; and, in the full tide of his
self-glorification, I turned the conversation on the black agate, now
become famous among the dealers. He could not resist the temptation, and
told me all about it. "A. believes it to be antique, don't he?" "O, he
is certain of it," said I. "Well, I'll tell you how it is: I bought the
thing of the man who made it, and paid him three scudi for it. I took it
to A. and offered it to him for six; but he refused it, thinking it to
be a paste. I took it away again, and, having had it tested as a stone,
offered it to him for twenty. After examining it and keeping it a few
days, he offered me twelve. I said no,--eighteen. _He_ said no. I said
sixteen, and he offered me fourteen, which I took. The fact is," said
he, "no one is able to say for certain if a stone is antique or not. A.
has the best judgment in Rome, but you see how he is deceived." I bought
of the same man a small engraved emerald, which he had just purchased of
a peasant, and, without much examination, sold me for one scudo, as a
basso-impero of ordinary quality. My eyes were better, and had seen, in
what he thought a handful of flowers, a cross; and on cleaning it we
found it to be an early Christian stone of much greater value than he
supposed, to his great chagrin.
If the perfections of our Scarabaeus give us a glimpse of Etruscan
existence, we may perhaps gather from the gems some notion of what Rome
was, beyond what historians have written, or the ruins of her palaces
and tombs have shown. The quantity of intaglii alone, such as they are,
which are dug up in the gardens and vineyards around Rome every year, is
incredible to one who has not watched day by day the acquisitions of the
antiquity shops, and the stalls of the Piazza Navona. Very few of them
are of any artistic value; but the fact that so many were made use of is
a marvel in itself, and implies a greater luxury than marble palaces
even hint at. I one day remarked to a peasant who brought me some
intaglii to sell, that the ancients must have worn a great many rings;
and he replied, that in his country the richer people wore so many that
they had to hold their hands up to keep them from falling off. On
inquiry I found that he came from the Abruzzi, where it seems that the
people still hold on to something of the antique customs; for we know
that the Romans began the fashion of covering the fingers to that
extravagant degree, so that the number of rings possessed by a family of
great wealth must have been almost inestimable. At every irruption of
the barbarians, the villas that covered the Campagna for miles around
Rome must have felt the first fury of their ravages; and as the stones
contained in the ornaments were of no use to the plunderers, they were
broken out and thrown away, many of them to be uncovered, more than a
thousand years later, by the spade of the trencher in the vineyards. One
of a number of peasants playing at bowls in one of the roads near Rome
struck with his ball a point of hardened mud, which flew in pieces,
disclosing an exquisite intaglio head of Nero in carnelian, in perfect
condition, for which the finder received ten scudi.
The laborers in the fields have so far learned the value of the stones
they find, that it becomes almost impossible anywhere in the vicinity of
Rome to buy them of the finders, even at the most extravagant prices.
Unable to distinguish in quality, and knowing that certain stones have
brought such and such prices, they refuse to sell any for a smaller
price, but retain them until the next _festa_, when they carry them in
succession to all the _mercanti di pietre_ in Rome, to see which will
offer the highest price,--a kind of vendue which evinces greater
trade-cleverness than the Italians get credit for, and which has the
effect of bringing the dealers at once to their best terms. No matter
what price you offer, they never accept it until they have tried the
value it has for others. It is only when a stone has such great value
that it justifies paying a price passing the imagination of the peasant,
that the buyer can profit by buying from the first hand.
Of the finer kind of intaglii, there is little danger of buying
counterfeits, since the art of gem-cutting is too low now to permit of
such counterfeits as might be mistaken for first-rate antiques. Of the
common kind, again, there are those which, cut with a certain
conventionalism in design and a facility in execution which incessant
repetition only can produce, cannot be imitated except at a cost utterly
beyond their market value. Like the designs on the Etruscan vases, their
main excellence is, that, being so good, they should be done so
facilely. An imitator loses the rapidity and spirit of execution. The
mass of imitations are of things only tolerably good, and of things
whose characteristics are in the execution merely, as in the Roman and
conventional Etruscan work.
I will close with one bit of advice to my readers. If your fancy finds
any satisfaction in _Scarabaei ed altri_, let your acquisition stop with
the first example,--take a sample brick from antiquity. If you once
commence collecting them in ever so small a way, or with any excuse to
your own pocket, you will find yourself subject to a fascination more
irresistible than the love of money,--more absorbing than the search for
the philosopher's stone. While you are in Rome, you will find yourself
unable to keep your feet from ways that lead to the antiquaries, or your
money out of the hands of a class (with two or three exceptions) of
cheats. You will find the extravagances of one day coming to be the
niggardness of the next; and feverish anxieties lest you should not
succeed in getting this gem, and irritating regrets that you too soon
bought that, will divide your tortured soul. And when you finally leave
Rome, as you must some day, you will always harbor a small canker-worm
of immitigable grief, that you did not purchase one stone you saw and
thought too high-priced; and will pass thenceforward no curiosity-shop
without looking in the windows a moment, in the hope of finding some gem
strayed away into parts where no man knows its value. If you feel in you
the capacity of loving them, let them alone.