what the Greek sculptors produced, are, both in number and in
excellence, in their fitness, therefore, to represent the whole of
which they were a part, quite out of proportion to what has come down
to us of Greek painting, and all those minor crafts which, in the
Greek workshop, as at all periods when the arts have been really
vigorous, were closely connected with the highest imaginative work.
Greek painting is represented to us only by its distant reflexion on
the walls of the buried houses of Pompeii, and the designs of
subordinate though exquisite craftsmen on the vases. Of wrought
metal, partly through the inherent usefulness of its material,
tempting ignorant persons into whose hands it may fall to re-fashion
it, we have comparatively little; while, in consequence of the
perishableness of their material, nothing [188] remains of the
curious wood-work, the carved ivory, the embroidery and coloured
stuffs, on which the Greeks set much store--of that whole system of
refined artisanship, diffused, like a general atmosphere of beauty
and richness, around the more exalted creations of Greek sculpture.
What we possess, then, of that highest Greek sculpture is presented
to us in a sort of threefold isolation; isolation, first of all, from
the concomitant arts--the frieze of the Parthenon without the metal
bridles on the horses, for which the holes in the marble remain;
isolation, secondly, from the architectural group of which, with most
careful estimate of distance and point of observation, that frieze,
for instance, was designed to be a part; isolation, thirdly, from the
clear Greek skies, the poetical Greek life, in our modern galleries.
And if one here or there, in looking at these things, bethinks
himself of the required substitution; if he endeavours mentally to
throw them back into that proper atmosphere, through which alone they
can exercise over us all the magic by which they charmed their
original spectators, the effort is not always a successful one,
within the grey walls of the Louvre or the British Museum.
And the circumstance that Greek sculpture is presented to us in such
falsifying isolation from the work of the weaver, the carpenter, and
the goldsmith, has encouraged a manner of regarding it too little
sensuous. Approaching it with full [189] information concerning what
may be called the inner life of the Greeks, their modes of thought
and sentiment amply recorded in the writings of the Greek poets and
philosophers, but with no lively impressions of that mere craftsman's
world of which so little has remained, students of antiquity have for
the most part interpreted the creations of Greek sculpture, rather as
elements in a sequence of abstract ideas, as embodiments, in a sort
of petrified language, of pure thoughts, and as interesting mainly in
connexion with the development of Greek intellect, than as elements
of a sequence in the material order, as results of a designed and
skilful dealing of accomplished fingers with precious forms of matter
for the delight of the eyes. Greek sculpture has come to be regarded
as the product of a peculiarly limited art, dealing with a specially
abstracted range of subjects; and the Greek sculptor as a workman
almost exclusively intellectual, having only a sort of accidental
connexion with the material in which his thought was expressed. He
is fancied to have been disdainful of such matters as the mere tone,
the fibre or texture, of his marble or cedar-wood, of that just
perceptible yellowness, for instance, in the ivory-like surface of
the Venus of Melos; as being occupied only with forms as abstract
almost as the conceptions of philosophy, and translateable it might
be supposed into any material--a habit of regarding him still further
encouraged by the modern [190] sculptor's usage of employing merely
mechanical labour in the actual working of the stone.
The works of the highest Greek sculpture are indeed intellectualised,
if we may say so, to the utmost degree; the human figures which they
present to us seem actually to conceive thoughts; in them, that
profoundly reasonable spirit of design which is traceable in Greek
art, continuously and increasingly, upwards from its simplest
products, the oil-vessel or the urn, reaches its perfection. Yet,
though the most abstract and intellectualised of sensuous objects,
they are still sensuous and material, addressing themselves, in the
first instance, not to the purely reflective faculty, but to the eye;
and a complete criticism must have approached them from both sides--
from the side of the intelligence indeed, towards which they rank as
great thoughts come down into the stone; but from the sensuous side
also, towards which they rank as the most perfect results of that
pure skill of hand, of which the Venus of Melos, we may say, is the
highest example, and the little polished pitcher or lamp, also
perfect in its way, perhaps the lowest.
To pass by the purely visible side of these things, then, is not only
to miss a refining pleasure, but to mistake altogether the medium in
which the most intellectual of the creations of Greek art, the
Aeginetan or the Elgin marbles, for instance, were actually produced;
even these having, in their origin, depended for much of [191] their
charm on the mere material in which they were executed; and the whole
black and grey world of extant antique sculpture needing to be
translated back into ivory and gold, if we would feel the excitement
which the Greek seems to have felt in the presence of these objects.
To have this really Greek sense of Greek sculpture, it is necessary
to connect it, indeed, with the inner life of the Greek world, its
thought and sentiment, on the one hand; but on the other hand to
connect it, also, with the minor works of price, intaglios, coins,
vases; with that whole system of material refinement and beauty in
the outer Greek life, which these minor works represent to us; and it
is with these, as far as possible, that we must seek to relieve the
air of our galleries and museums of their too intellectual greyness.
Greek sculpture could not have been precisely a cold thing; and,
whatever a colour-blind school may say, pure thoughts have their
coldness, a coldness which has sometimes repelled from Greek
sculpture, with its unsuspected fund of passion and energy in
material form, those who cared much, and with much insight, for a
similar passion and energy in the coloured world of Italian painting.
Theoretically, then, we need that world of the minor arts as a
complementary background for the higher and more austere Greek
sculpture; and, as matter of fact, it is just with such a world--with
a period of refined and exquisite [192] tectonics+ (as the Greeks
called all crafts strictly subordinate to architecture), that Greek
art actually begins, in what is called the Heroic Age, that earliest,
undefined period of Greek civilisation, the beginning of which cannot
be dated, and which reaches down to the first Olympiad, about the
year 776 B.C. Of this period we possess, indeed, no direct history,
and but few actual monuments, great or small; but as to its whole
character and outward local colouring, for its art, as for its
politics and religion, Homer may be regarded as an authority. The
Iliad and the Odyssey, the earliest pictures of that heroic life,
represent it as already delighting itself in the application of
precious material and skilful handiwork to personal and domestic
adornment, to the refining and beautifying of the entire outward
aspect of life; above all, in the lavish application of very graceful
metal-work to such purposes. And this representation is borne out by
what little we possess of its actual remains, and by all we can
infer. Mixed, of course, with mere fable, as a description of the
heroic age, the picture which Homer presents to us, deprived of its
supernatural adjuncts, becomes continuously more and more realisable
as the actual condition of early art, when we emerge gradually into
historical time, and find ourselves at last among dateable works and
real schools or masters.
The history of Greek art, then, begins, as some have fancied general
history to begin, in a [193] golden age, but in an age, so to speak,
of real gold, the period of those first twisters and hammerers of the
precious metals--men who had already discovered the flexibility of
silver and the ductility of gold, the capacity of both for infinite
delicacy of handling, and who enjoyed, with complete freshness, a
sense of beauty and fitness in their work--a period of which that
flower of gold on a silver stalk, picked up lately in one of the
graves at Mycenae, or the legendary golden honeycomb of Daedalus,
might serve as the symbol. The heroic age of Greek art is the age of
the hero as smith.
There are in Homer two famous descriptive passages in which this
delight in curious metal-work is very prominent; the description in
the Iliad of the shield of Achilles* and the description of the house
of Alcinous in the Odyssey.* The shield of Achilles is part of the
suit of armour which Hephaestus makes for him at the request of
Thetis; and it is wrought of variously Coloured metals, woven into a
great circular composition in relief, representing the world and the
life in it. The various activities of man are recorded in this
description in a series of idyllic incidents with such complete
freshness, liveliness, and variety, that the reader from time to time
may well forget himself, and fancy he is reading a mere description
of the incidents of actual life. [194] We peep into a little Greek
town, and see in dainty miniature the bride coming from her chamber
with torch-bearers and dancers, the people gazing from their doors, a
quarrel between two persons in the market-place, the assembly of the
elders to decide upon it. In another quartering is the spectacle of
a city besieged, the walls defended by the old men, while the
soldiers have stolen out and are lying in ambush. There is a fight
on the river-bank; Ares and Athene, conspicuous in gold, and marked
as divine persons by a scale larger than that of their followers,
lead the host. The strange, mythical images of Kêr, Eris, and
Kudoimos mingle in the crowd. A third space upon the shield depicts
the incidents of peaceful labour--the ploughshare passing through the
field, of enameled black metal behind it, and golden before; the cup
of mead held out to the ploughman when he reaches the end of the
furrow; the reapers with their sheaves; the king standing in silent
pleasure among them, intent upon his staff. There are the labourers
in the vineyard in minutest detail; stakes of silver on which the
vines hang; the dark trench about it, and one pathway through the
midst; the whole complete and distinct, in variously coloured metal.
All things and living creatures are in their places--the cattle
coming to water to the sound of the herdsman's pipe, various music,
the rushes by the water-side, a lion-hunt with dogs, [195] the
pastures among the hills, a dance, the fair dresses of the male and
female dancers, the former adorned with swords, the latter with
crowns. It is an image of ancient life, its pleasure and business.
For the centre, as in some quaint chart of the heavens, are the earth
and the sun, the moon and constellations; and to close in all, right
round, like a frame to the picture, the great river Oceanus, forming
the rim of the shield, in some metal of dark blue.
Still more fascinating, perhaps, because more completely realisable
by the fancy as an actual thing--realisable as a delightful place to
pass time in--is the description of the palace of Alcinous in the
little island town of the Phaeacians, to which we are introduced in
all the liveliness and sparkle of the morning, as real as something
seen last summer on the sea-coast; although, appropriately, Ulysses
meets a goddess, like a young girl carrying a pitcher, on his way up
from the sea. Below the steep walls of the town, two projecting
jetties allow a narrow passage into a haven of stone for the ships,
into which the passer-by may look down, as they lie moored below the
roadway. In the midst is the king's house, all glittering, again,
with curiously wrought metal; its brightness is "as the brightness of
the sun or of the moon." The heart of Ulysses beats quickly when he
sees it standing amid plantations ingeniously watered, its floor and
walls of brass throughout, with continuous [196] cornice of dark
iron; the doors are of gold, the door-posts and lintels of silver,
the handles, again, of gold--
The walls were massy brass; the cornice high
Blue metals crowned in colours of the sky;
Rich plates of gold the folding-doors incase;
The pillars silver on a brazen base;
Silver the lintels deep-projecting o'er;
And gold the ringlets that command the door.
Dogs of the same precious metals keep watch on either side, like the
lions over the old gate-way of Mycenae, or the gigantic, human-headed
bulls at the entrance of an Assyrian palace. Within doors the
burning lights at supper-time are supported in the hands of golden
images of boys, while the guests recline on a couch running all along
the wall, covered with peculiarly sumptuous women's work.
From these two glittering descriptions manifestly something must be
deducted; we are in wonder-land, and among supernatural or magical
conditions. But the forging of the shield and the wonderful house of
Alcinous are no merely incongruous episodes in Homer, but the
consummation of what is always characteristic of him, a constant
preoccupation, namely, with every form of lovely craftsmanship,
resting on all things, as he says, like the shining of the sun. We
seem to pass, in reading him, through the treasures of some royal
collection; in him the presentation of almost every aspect of life is
[197] beautified by the work of cunning hands. The thrones, coffers,
couches of curious carpentry, are studded with bossy ornaments of
precious metal effectively disposed, or inlaid with stained ivory, or
blue cyanus, or amber, or pale amber-like gold; the surfaces of the
stone conduits, the sea-walls, the public washing-troughs, the
ramparts on which the weary soldiers rest themselves when returned to
Troy, are fair and smooth; all the fine qualities, in colour and
texture, of woven stuff are carefully noted--the fineness, closeness,
softness, pliancy, gloss, the whiteness or nectar-like tints in which
the weaver delights to work; to weave the sea-purple threads is the
appropriate function of queens and noble women. All the Homeric
shields are more or less ornamented with variously coloured metal,
terrible sometimes, like Leonardo's, with some monster or grotesque.
The numerous sorts of cups are bossed with golden studs, or have
handles wrought with figures, of doves, for instance. The great
brazen cauldrons bear an epithet which means flowery. The trappings
of the horses, the various parts of the chariots, are formed of
various metals. The women's ornaments and the instruments of their
toilet are described--
porpas te gnamptas th' helikas, kalukas te kai hormous+
--the golden vials for unguents. Use and beauty are still undivided;
all that men's hands are set to make has still a fascination alike
for workmen [198] and spectators. For such dainty splendour Troy,
indeed, is especially conspicuous. But then Homer's Trojans are
essentially Greeks--Greeks of Asia; and Troy, though more advanced in
all elements of civilisation, is no real contrast to the western
shore of the Aegean. It is no barbaric world that we see, but the
sort of world, we may think, that would have charmed also our
comparatively jaded sensibilities, with just that quaint simplicity
which we too enjoy in its productions; above all, in its wrought
metal, which loses perhaps more than any other sort of work by
becoming mechanical. The metal-work which Homer describes in such
variety is all hammer-work, all the joinings being effected by pins
or riveting. That is just the sort of metal-work which, in a certain
naïveté and vigour, is still of all work the most expressive of
actual contact with dexterous fingers; one seems to trace in it, on
every particle of the partially resisting material, the touch and
play of the shaping instruments, in highly trained hands, under the
guidance of exquisitely disciplined senses--that cachet, or seal of
nearness to the workman's hand, which is the special charm of all
good metal-work, of early metal-work in particular.
Such descriptions, however, it may be said, are mere poetical
ornament, of no value in helping us to define the character of an
age. But what is peculiar in these Homeric descriptions, [199] what
distinguishes them from others at first sight similar, is a sort of
internal evidence they present of a certain degree of reality, signs
in them of an imagination stirred by surprise at the spectacle of
real works of art. Such minute, delighted, loving description of
details of ornament, such following out of the ways in which brass,
gold, silver, or paler gold, go into the chariots and armour and
women's dress, or cling to the walls--the enthusiasm of the manner--
is the warrant of a certain amount of truth in all that. The Greek
poet describes these things with the same vividness and freshness,
the same kind of fondness, with which other poets speak of flowers;
speaking of them poetically, indeed, but with that higher sort of
poetry which seems full of the lively impression of delightful things
recently seen. Genuine poetry, it is true, is always naturally
sympathetic with all beautiful sensible things and qualities. But
with how many poets would not this constant intrusion of material
ornament have produced a tawdry effect! The metal would all be
tarnished and the edges blurred. And this is because it is not
always that the products of even exquisite tectonics can excite or
refine the aesthetic sense. Now it is probable that the objects of
oriental art, the imitations of it at home, in which for Homer this
actual world of art must have consisted, reached him in a quantity,
and with a novelty, just sufficient to warm and stimulate without
[200] surfeiting the imagination; it is an exotic thing of which he
sees just enough and not too much. The shield of Achilles, the house
of Alcinous, are like dreams indeed, but this sort of dreaming winds
continuously through the entire Iliad and Odyssey--a child's dream
after a day of real, fresh impressions from things themselves, in
which all those floating impressions re-set themselves. He is as
pleased in touching and looking at those objects as his own heroes;
their gleaming aspect brightens all he says, and has taken hold, one
might think, of his language, his very vocabulary becoming
chryselephantine. Homer's artistic descriptions, though enlarged by
fancy, are not wholly imaginary, and the extant remains of monuments
of the earliest historical age are like lingering relics of that
dream in a tamer but real world.
The art of the heroic age, then, as represented in Homer, connects
itself, on the one side, with those fabulous jewels so prominent in
mythological story, and entwined sometimes so oddly in its
representation of human fortunes--the necklace of Eriphyle, the
necklace of Helen, which Menelaus, it was said, offered at Delphi to
Athene Pronoea, on the eve of his expedition against Troy--mythical
objects, indeed, but which yet bear witness even thus early to the
aesthetic susceptibility of the Greek temper. But, on the other
hand, the art of the heroic age connects itself also with the actual
early beginnings [201] of artistic production. There are touches of
reality, for instance, in Homer's incidental notices of its
instruments and processes; especially as regards the working of
metal. He goes already to the potter's wheel for familiar, life-like
illustration. In describing artistic wood-work he distinguishes
various stages of work; we see clearly the instruments for turning
and boring, such as the old-fashioned drill-borer, whirled round with
a string; he mentions the names of two artists, the one of an actual
workman, the other of a craft turned into a proper name--stray
relics, accidentally preserved, of a world, as we may believe, of
such wide and varied activity. The forge of Hephaestus is a true
forge; the magic tripods on which he is at work are really put
together by conceivable processes, known in early times.
Compositions in relief similar to those which he describes were
actually made out of thin metal plates cut into a convenient shape,
and then beaten into the designed form by the hammer over a wooden
model. These reliefs were then fastened to a differently coloured
metal background or base, with nails or rivets, for there is no
soldering of metals as yet. To this process the ancients gave the
name of empaestik,+ such embossing being still, in our own time, a
beautiful form of metal-work.
Even in the marvellous shield there are other and indirect notes of
reality. In speaking of the shield of Achilles, I departed
intentionally from [202] the order in which the subjects of the
relief are actually introduced in the Iliad, because, just then, I
wished the reader to receive the full effect of the variety and
elaborateness of the composition, as a representation or picture of
the whole of ancient life embraced within the circumference of a
shield. But in the order in which Homer actually describes those
episodes he is following the method of a very practicable form of
composition, and is throughout much closer than we might at first
sight suppose to the ancient armourer's proceedings. The shield is
formed of five superimposed plates of different metals, each plate of
smaller diameter than the one immediately below it, their flat
margins showing thus as four concentric stripes or rings of metal,
around a sort of boss in the centre, five metals thick, and the
outermost circle or ring being the thinnest. To this arrangement the
order of Homer's description corresponds. The earth and the heavenly
bodies are upon this boss in the centre, like a little distant heaven
hung above the broad world, and from this Homer works out, round and
round, to the river Oceanus, which forms the border of the whole; the
subjects answering to, or supporting each other, in a sort of
heraldic order--the city at peace set over against the city besieged-
-spring, summer, and autumn balancing each other--quite congruously
with a certain heraldic turn common in contemporary Assyrian art,
which delights in [203] this sort of conventional spacing out of its
various subjects, and especially with some extant metal chargers of
Assyrian work, which, like some of the earliest Greek vases with
their painted plants and flowers conventionally arranged, illustrate
in their humble measure such heraldic grouping.
The description of the shield of Hercules, attributed to Hesiod, is
probably an imitation of Homer, and, notwithstanding some fine
mythological impersonations which it contains, an imitation less
admirable than the original. Of painting there are in Homer no
certain indications, and it is consistent with the later date of the
imitator that we may perhaps discern in his composition a sign that
what he had actually seen was a painted shield, in the pre-dominance
in it, as compared with the Homeric description, of effects of colour
over effects of form; Homer delighting in ingenious devices for
fastening the metal, and the supposed Hesiod rather in what seem like
triumphs of heraldic colouring; though the latter also delights in
effects of mingled metals, of mingled gold and silver especially--
silver figures with dresses of gold, silver centaurs with pine-trees
of gold for staves in their hands. Still, like the shield of
Achilles, this too we must conceive as formed of concentric plates of
metal; and here again that spacing is still more elaborately carried
out, narrower intermediate rings being apparently [204] introduced
between the broader ones, with figures in rapid, horizontal, unbroken
motion, carrying the eye right round the shield, in contrast with the
repose of the downward or inward movement of the subjects which
divide the larger spaces; here too with certain analogies in the rows
of animals to the designs on the earliest vases.