Читать книгу The Art in Ancient Egypt - Perrot Georges - Страница 6

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The successful interpretation of the ancient writings of Egypt, Chaldæa, and Persia, which has distinguished our times, makes it necessary that the history of antiquity should be rewritten. Documents that for thousands of years lay hidden beneath the soil, and inscriptions which, like those of Egypt and Persia, long offered themselves to the gaze of man merely to excite his impotent curiosity, have now been deciphered and made to render up their secrets for the guidance of the historian. By the help of those strings of hieroglyphs and of cuneiform characters, illustrated by paintings and sculptured reliefs, we are enabled to separate the truth from the falsehood, the chaff from the wheat, in the narratives of the Greek writers who busied themselves with those nations of Africa and Asia which preceded their own in the ways of civilization. Day by day, as new monuments have been discovered and more certain methods of reading their inscriptions elaborated, we have added to the knowledge left us by Herodotus and Diodorus Siculus, to our acquaintance with those empires on the Euphrates and the Nile which were already in old age when the Greeks were yet struggling to emerge from their primitive barbarism.

Even in the cases of Greece and Rome, whose histories are supplied in their main lines by their classic writers, the study of hitherto neglected writings discloses many new and curious details. The energetic search for ancient inscriptions, and the scrupulous and ingenious interpretation of their meaning, which we have witnessed and are witnessing, have revealed to us many interesting facts of which no trace is to be found in Thucydides or Xenophon, in Livy or Tacitus; enabling us to enrich with more than one feature the picture of private and public life which they have handed down to us. In the effort to embrace the life of ancient times as a whole, many attempts have been made to fix the exact place in it occupied by art, but those attempts have never been absolutely successful, because the comprehension of works of art, of plastic creations in the widest significance of that word, demands an amount of special knowledge which the great majority of historians are without; art has a method and language of its own, which obliges those who wish to learn it thoroughly to cultivate their taste by frequenting the principal museums of Europe, by visiting distant regions at the cost of considerable trouble and expense, by perpetual reference to the great collections of engravings, photographs, and other reproductions which considerations of space and cost prevent the savant from possessing at home. More than one learned author has never visited Italy or Greece, or has found no time to examine their museums, each of which contains but a small portion of the accumulated remains of antique art. Some connoisseurs do not even live in a capital, but dwell far from those public libraries, which often contain valuable collections, and sometimes—when they are not packed away in cellars or at the binder's—allow them to be studied by the curious.[2] The study of art, difficult enough in itself, is thus rendered still more arduous by the obstacles which are thrown in its way. The difficulty of obtaining materials for self-improvement in this direction affords the true explanation of the absence, in modern histories of antiquity, of those laborious researches which have led to such great results since Winckelmann founded the science of archæology as we know it. To take the case of Greece, many learned writers have in our time attempted to retrace its complete history—England, Germany, and France have each contributed works which, by various merits, have conquered the favour of Europe. But of all these works the only one which betrays any deep study of Greek art, and treats it with taste and competence, is that of M. Ernest Curtius; as for Mr. Grote, he has neither a theoretic knowledge of art, nor a feeling for it. Here and there, indeed, where he cannot avoid it, he alludes to the question, but in the fewest and driest phrases possible. And yet Greece, without its architects, its sculptors, and its painters, without in fact its passion for beautiful form, a passion as warm and prolific as its love for poetry, is hardly Greece at all.

Much disappointment is thus prepared for those who, without the leisure to enter deeply into detail, wish to picture to themselves the various aspects of the ancient world. They are told of revolutions, of wars and conquests, of the succession of princes; the mechanism of political and civil institutions is explained to them; "literature," we are told, "is the expression of social life," and so the history of literature is written for us. All this is true enough, but there is another truth which seems to be always forgotten, that the art of a people is quite as clear an indication of their sentiments, tastes, and ideas, as their literature. But on this subject most historians say little, contenting themselves with the brief mention of certain works and proper names, and with the summary statement of a few general ideas which do not even possess the merit of precision. And where are we to find the information thus refused? Europe possesses several histories of Greek and Roman literature, written with great talent and eloquence, such as the work, unhappily left unfinished, of Ottfried Müller; there are, too, excellent manuals, rich in valuable facts, such as those of Bernhardy, Baehr, and Teuffel; but where is there, either in England, in France, or in Germany, a single work which retraces, in sufficient detail, the whole history of antique art, following it throughout its progress and into all its transformations, from its origin to its final decadence, down to the epoch when Christianity and the barbaric invasions put an end to the ancient forms of civilization and prepared for the birth of the modern world, for the evolution of a new society and of a new art?

To this question our neighbours may reply that the Geschichte der bildenden Kunst of Carl Schnaase[3] does all that we ask. But that work has one great disadvantage for those who are not Germans. Its great bulk will almost certainly prevent its ever finding a translator, while it makes it very tedious reading to a foreigner. It must, besides, be very difficult, not to say impossible, for a single writer to treat with equal competence the arts of Asia, of Greece, and of Rome, of the Middle Ages and of modern times. As one might have expected, all the parts of such an extensive whole are by no means of equal value, and the chapters which treat of antique art are the least satisfactory. Of the eight volumes of which the work consists, two are devoted to ancient times, and, by general acknowledgment, they are not the two best. They were revised, indeed, for the second edition, by two colleagues whom Herr Schnaase called in to his assistance; oriental art by Carl von Lützow, and that of Greece and Rome by Carl Friedrichs. But the chapters in which Assyria, Chaldæa, Persia, Phœnicia, and Egypt are discussed are quite inadequate. No single question is exhaustively treated. Instead of well-considered personal views, we have vague guesses and explanations which do nothing to solve the many problems which perplex archæologists. The illustrations are not numerous enough to be useful, and, in most cases, they do not seem to have been taken from the objects themselves. Those which relate to architecture, especially, have been borrowed from other well known works, and furnish therefore no new elements for appreciation or discussion. Finally, the order adopted by the author is not easily understood. For reasons which have decided us to follow the same course, and which we will explain farther on, he takes no account of the extreme east, of China and Japan; but then, why begin with India, which had no relations with the peoples on the shores of the Mediterranean until a very late date, and, so far as art was concerned, rather came under their influence than brought them under its own?

The fact is that Schnaase follows a geographical order, which is very confusing in its results. To give but one example of its absurdity, he speaks of the Phœnicians before he has said a word of Egypt; now, we all know that the art of Tyre and Sidon was but a late reflection from that of Egypt; the workshops of those two famous ports were mere factories of cheap Egyptian art objects for exportation.

Again, the first part of Herr Schnaase's work is already seventeen years old, and how many important discoveries have taken place since 1865? Those of Cesnola and Schliemann, for instance, have revealed numberless points of contact and transmission between one phase of antique art and another, which were never thought of twenty years ago. The book therefore is not "down to date." With all the improvements which a new edition might introduce, that part of it which deals with antiquity can never be anything but an abridgment with the faults inherent in that kind of work. It could never have the amplitude of treatment or the originality which made Winckelmann's History of Art and Ottfried Müller's Manual of Artistic Archæology so successful in their day.[4]

Winckelmann's History of Art among the Ancients, originally published in 1764, is one of those rare books which mark an epoch in the history of the human intellect. The German writer was the first to formulate the idea, now familiar enough to cultivated intelligences, that art springs up, flourishes, and decays, with the society to which it belongs; in a word, that it is possible to write its history.[5] This great savant, whose memory Germany holds in honour as the father of classic archæology, was not content with stating a principle: he followed it through to its consequences; he began by tracing the outlines of the science which he founded, and he never rested till he had filled them in. However, now that a century has passed away since it appeared, his great work, which even yet is never opened without a sentiment of respect, marks a date beyond which modern curiosity has long penetrated. Winckelmann's knowledge of Egyptian art was confined to the pasticcios of the Roman epoch, and to the figures which passed from the villa of Hadrian to the museum of Cardinal Albani. Chaldæa and Assyria, Persia and Phœnicia, had no existence for him; even Greece as a whole was not known to him. Her painted vases were still hidden in Etruscan and Campanian cemeteries; the few which had found their way to the light had not yet succeeded in drawing the attention of men who were preoccupied over more imposing manifestations of the Greek genius. Nearly all Winckelmann's attention was given to the works of the sculptors, upon which most of his comprehensive judgments were founded; and yet, even in regard to them, he was not well-informed. His opportunities of personal inspection were confined to the figures, mostly of unknown origin, which filled the Italian galleries. The great majority of these formed part of the crowd of copies which issued from the workshops of Greece, for some three centuries or more, to embellish the temples, the basilicas, and the public baths, the villas and the palaces of the masters of the world. In the very few instances in which they were either originals or copies executed with sufficient care to be fair representations of the original, they never dated from an earlier epoch than that of Praxiteles, Scopas, and Lysippus. Phidias and Alcamenes, Pæonius and Polycletus, the great masters of the fifth century, were only known to the historian by the descriptions and allusions of the ancient authors.

In such a case as this the clearest and most precise of verbal descriptions is of less value than any fragment of marble upon which the hand of the artist is still to be traced. Who would then have guessed that the following generation would have the opportunity of studying those splendid groups of decorative sculpture whose close relation to the architecture of certain famous temples has taught us so much? Who in those days dreamt of looking at, still less of drawing, the statues in the pediments and sculptured friezes of the Parthenon, of the Thesæum, of the temples at Ægina, at Phigalia, or at Olympia? Now if Winckelmann was ignorant of these, the real monuments of classic perfection, it follows that he was hardly competent to recognise and define true archaism or to distinguish the works of sculpture which bore the marks of the deliberate, eclectic, and over-polished taste of the critical epochs. He made the same mistake in speaking of architecture. It was always, or nearly always, by the edifices of Rome and Italy, by their arrangement and decoration, that he pretended to explain and judge the architecture of Greece.

But Winckelmann rendered a great service to art by founding a method of study which was soon applied by Zoëga[6] and by Ennio Quirino Visconti,[7] to the description of the works which filled public and private galleries, or were being continually discovered by excavation. These two savants classified a vast quantity of facts; thanks to their incessant labours, the lines of the master's rough sketch were accented and corrected at more than one point; the divisions which he had introduced into his picture were marked with greater precision; the groups which he had begun to form were rendered more coherent and compact; their features became more precise, more distinct, and more expressive. This progress was continuous, but after the great wars of the Revolution and the Empire its march became much more rapid, and the long peace which saw the growth of so rich a harvest of talent, was also marked by a great increase in the energy with which all kinds of historical studies were prosecuted.

But the widest, as well as the most sudden, enlargement of the horizon was due to a rapid succession of discoveries, some the result of persevering searches and lucky excavations, others rendered possible by feats of induction which almost amounted to genius. It seemed as though a curtain were drawn up, and, behind the rich and brilliant scenery of Græco-Roman civilization, the real ancient world, the world of the East, the father of religions and of useful inventions, of the alphabet and of the plastic arts, were suddenly revealed to us. The great work which was compiled by the savants who accompanied Bonaparte to Egypt first introduced the antiquities of that country to us, and not long afterwards Champollion discovered the key to the hieroglyphics, and thus enabled us to assign to the monuments of the country at least a relative date.

A little later Layard and Botta freed Nineveh from the ruins of its own buildings, and again let in the light upon ancient Assyria. But yesterday we knew nothing beyond the names of its kings, and yet it sprang again to the day, its monuments in marvellous preservation, its history pictured by thousands of figures in relief and narrated by their accompanying inscriptions. These did not long keep their secrets to themselves, and their interpretation enables us to classify chronologically the works of architecture and sculpture which have been discovered.

The information thus obtained was supplemented by careful exploration of the ruins in Babylonia, lower Chaldæa, and Susiana. These had been less tenderly treated by time and by man than the remains of Nineveh. The imposing ruins of the palace at Persepolis and of the tombs of the kings, had been known for nearly two centuries, but only by the inadequate descriptions and feeble drawings of early travellers. Ker-Porter, Texier, and Flandrin provided us with more accurate and comprehensive descriptions, and, thanks to their careful copies of the writings upon the walls of those buildings, and upon the inscribed stones of Persia and Media, Eugène Burnouf succeeded in reconstructing the alphabet of Darius and Xerxes.

Thus, to the toils of artists and learned men, who examined the country from the mountains of Armenia to the low and marshy plains of Susiana, and from the deserts which border the Euphrates to the rocks of Media and Persia, and to the philologists who deciphered the texts and classified the monumental fragments which had travelled so far from the scene of their creation, we owe our power to describe, upon a sound basis and from authentic materials, the great civilisation which was developed in Western Asia, in the basin of the Persian Gulf. There were still many details which escaped us, but, through the shadows which every day helped to dissipate, the essential outlines and the leading masses began to be clearly distinguished, and the local distinctions which, in such a vast extent of country and so long a succession of empires, were caused by differences of race, of time, and of physical conditions, began to be appreciated. But, in spite of all these differences, the choice of expressive means and their employment, from Babylon to Nineveh, and from Nineveh to Susa and Persepolis, presented so many points of striking similarity as to prove that the various peoples represented by those famous capitals all sprang from the same original stock. The elements of writing and of the arts are in each case identical. The alphabets were all formed upon the same cuneiform principle, notwithstanding the variety in the languages which they served. In the plastic arts, although the plans of their buildings vary in obedience to the requirements of different materials, their sculpture always betrays the same way of looking at living forms, the same conventions and the same motives. Every work fashioned by the hand of man which has been discovered within the boundaries given above, displays community of style and unity of origin and tradition.

The result of these searches and discoveries was to show clearly that this ancient civilisation had sprung from two original sources, the one in the valley of the Nile, the other in Chaldæa. The latter was the less ancient of the two, and was considerably nearer our own time than the epoch which witnessed the commencement of the long series of Egyptian dynasties by the reign of Menes. These two civilizations met and intermingled through the agency of the Phœnicians, and any active and prolific interchange of ideas and products began, traces of which are still to be found both in Egypt and Assyria.

It still remained doubtful, and the doubt has but lately been removed, how the influence of these two great centres of cultivation was extended to the still barbarous tribes, the ancestors of the Greeks and Romans, who inhabited the northern and eastern shores of the Mediterranean.

It is only within the last twenty years, since the mission of M. Renan, that Phœnicia has become well-known to us. Several English and French travellers, Hamilton, Fellows, Texier, among others, had already, in the first half of the century, described the curious monuments of Lydia, Phrygia, Cappadocia, and of the still more picturesque Lycia, whose spoils now enrich the British Museum; people vaguely conjectured that through those countries had progressed, stage by stage, from the east to the west, the forms and inventions of a system of civilization which had been elaborated in the distant Chaldæa. But it was not till 1861 that an expedition, inspired by the desire to clear up this very question, succeeded in demonstrating the rôle actually played by the peoples inhabiting the plateau of Asia Minor. As for Cyprus, it was but yesterday that the explorations of Lang and Cesnola revealed it to us, with its art half Egyptian and half Assyrian, and its cuneiform alphabet pressed into the service of a Greek dialect. These discoveries have put us on the alert. Not a year passes without some lucky "find," such as that of the Palæstrina treasure, in the immediate neighbourhood of Rome, or that made by Salzmann at Rhodes. These pieces of good fortune allow the archæologist to supply, one by one, the missing links of the chain which attaches the arts of Greece and Italy to the earlier civilizations of Egypt and Assyria.

While the remains of Oriental antiquity were being thus recovered piece by piece, secrets no less interesting and documents no less curious were continually coming to the surface to cast new light upon the history of classic antiquity. First came the marbles of the Parthenon, transferred by Lord Elgin to the British Museum in 1816. Both artists and connoisseurs, after a short pause of hesitation, agreed in asserting that the bas-reliefs of the frieze and the sculptures of the two pediments excelled anything which had previously entered into any European museum. Artists declared that they experienced a sense of beauty never felt before; they were face to face for the first time with the ideal of the Greeks, as it had been conceived and realised at that happy period of perfection which followed the disappearance of the last traces of archaic hardness. That period was but too short. It was comprised in a single generation, which was followed by one which made the first steps down the slope of the decadence. During a single lifetime a crowd of works were produced which, in spite of differences in material and subject, were all stamped with the same character of easy and frank nobility, of sincerity and elegant severity, of simplicity combined with grandeur. The death, or even the old age of the great men who had produced these works, was sufficient to lower the standard. Emphasis and a striving for effect took the place of nobility; under a pretence of sincerity, artists took to a servile imitation of nature, and mannerism, with all its weaknesses, began to disfigure their works. Art remained at a high level in Greece, however, longer than elsewhere. The word decadence can hardly be pronounced in connection with the admirable works produced in the fourth century before Christ, and yet it cannot be denied that, so long as we were without original examples from the great epoch of Pericles, we were without that most necessary material for a history of Greek art, a knowledge of the most masterly, the most pure, and the most elevated of her creations. The literary historian might as well have attempted to trace the course of her poetry without having read Sophocles, without having heard of the Electra or the Œdipus Rex.

Attention being once turned in this direction, discoveries followed each other in rapid succession. The statues from the pediments at Ægina, so ably restored by Thorwaldsen, were bought to form the nucleus of the collection at Munich.[8] The study of these statues is very instructive in making clear to us the paths which sculptors had to follow in their progress from the stiffness and conventions of early periods to the ease and amplitude of classic perfection. As for the friezes from the temple of Apollo Epicurius, near Phigalia, they too are in the British Museum.[9] Thus brought into immediate propinquity with the marbles from the Parthenon, with which they are almost cotemporary, they afford us some curious information. They show us what the art of Phidias and Alcamenes became when those sculptors had to work in what we should call "the provinces;" how much they preserved and how much they lost of their complete excellence when employed upon buildings erected at less cost and with less care than those of the capital. So far as the composition is concerned, the consummate facility and the natural verve of the master who supplied the sketches and models is never absent, but the execution, which must have been left to local artists, betrays their inferiority by its inequalities and general weakness. The same may be said of the figures with which Alcamenes and Pæonius ornamented the pediments and metopes of the Temple of Zeus at Olympia. Even before the discoveries at Ægina and Phigalia, the results of the French expedition to the Morea and the beautiful fragments of sculpture brought to the Louvre from the banks of the Alphæus, had given us reason to suspect this inferiority of provincial art, and the excavations recently undertaken by Germany, after an interval of about half a century of inaction, have finally removed all doubts. Neither the statues nor the bas-reliefs, nor any other part of the decoration of the temple at Olympia, possess the nobility and purity which distinguish the great buildings on the Athenian acropolis. They show abundant power and science, but also perceptible inequalities, and certain signs of that exaggerated objectivity which we now call realism. Each fresh discovery helps us to comprehend, not without a certain sense of surprise, how much freedom and variety Greek art possessed during its best time. There is none of that dull uniformity which, with other races, distinguishes most of the works of a single epoch, none of the tyranny of a single master or school, none of the narrowness of mere formulæ.

The memorable exploration to which we have alluded, and many others which it would take too long to enumerate, have not only made known to us the most original and most fertile period of Greek sculpture, but have given us much information as to that art which, when combined with the statues of Phidias and Alcamenes, reared those splendid creations which have been reconstructed with such skill and care by the artist and the archæologist; we mean Greek architecture at its best, the purest and the most complete architecture which the world has yet seen. Every year sees the excellent example set by Stuart and Revett,[10] in the second half of the eighteenth century, followed by an increasing number of imitators. The smallest remains of ancient architecture are measured and drawn with religious care; their arrangements are explained, their elements are grouped, their ensemble is restored with a comprehension of their artistic conditions which steadily gains in certainty and penetration. Blouet's interesting restorations of Olympia and Phigalia, published in the account of the French expedition to the Morea,[11] excited the emulation of the young architects at the French Academy in Rome, and opened to them a new course of study. Until then they had been contented with the monumental buildings of Rome and its neighbourhood, of Latium and Campania; a few of the more adventurous among them had penetrated as far as Pæstum; but it was not till 1845 that they ventured to cross the sea and to study the ruins of Greece and Athens;[12] in later years they have travelled as far as Syria and Asia Minor in search of objects for their pencils.[13]

But the occupants of the Villa Medici were not alone in these researches. Doubtless, the invaluable publication which contains the results of their labours, forms the most ample and varied collection of documents open to the historian of architecture among the ancients. But many other architects of different nationalities have given their help to the work of patiently reconstructing the past.[14]

Examined thus closely, and by the trained eyes of professional artists provided with all the necessary instruments, the relics of antiquity yielded up secrets which would never have been suspected by the casual observer. Thus Mr. Penrose discovered and explained that those walls of the Propylæum and of the Parthenon, which seemed straight to the eye, are in fact planned on a gentle curve;[15] he showed how this subtle variation was calculated to add to the beauty of the buildings, and to augment their effect. Hittorf arrived at still more important results through the minute examination of the Sicilian ruins. He was the first to describe the important part which painting played in the decoration of Greek architecture; he affirmed that in many parts of their buildings the stone or marble was painted over, and that the various members of the architecture were distinguished by differences of tint, which gave accent to the mouldings, and force to the figures in relief. These ideas were too strongly opposed to modern habits of thought to be received without strong protestations. Their partisans, too, did something to retard their acceptance by their absolute fashion of stating their convictions, and by certain unhappy applications of their system; but the polychromatic principles of the Greeks are now confirmed by too many facts to be denied.[16]

Of the three principal branches of ancient art, that of which we know least is painting, properly speaking; the art of Polygnotus, of Zeuxis, and of Apelles. Of this we have but few remains, and we are obliged to take our ideas of its excellence from the descriptions of ancient authors. We have indeed the wall-paintings of those Campanian cities which were so long buried under the ashes of Vesuvius; paintings which were uncovered in great numbers under the Napoleonic domination, and have in later times been added to every year, in spite of the indolent fashion in which the excavations have been conducted. Fragmentary mural paintings of the same kind have also been discovered in Rome and in a few other neighbourhoods. But after all, great though the interest may be which attaches to these works, it must not be forgotten that they are Italian rather than Greek, that they are the decorations for the most part of small provincial cities, and that even the best of them, when compared with the productions of the fifth and fourth centuries before our era, are examples of decadence. At the most they enable us to recall, with some approach to probable truth, the taste and technical methods of the Alexandrian school.[17] Winckelmann and his immediate successors saw the ashes cleared from the first Pompeian wall-paintings. But they possessed no standards by which they could define the styles of those great schools of painting which flourished in Greece between the epoch of the Persian Wars and the beginning of the Macedonian supremacy; such a definition we may now however attempt with at least partial success. Since the time of Winckelmann hundreds and thousands of those painted vases of burnt clay, which the public persist in calling Etruscan, have been discovered, classified, described, and explained, in such a manner as to leave unsolved scarcely any of the problems upon which they could cast a light.

Gerhard led the way in 1831 with his famous report on the Volscian vases;[18] numerous savants have followed his example, and nearly every day the series which they have established are enriched by new discoveries. These vases, as we now know, were made in many places, at Athens, at Corinth, in the Greek cities of Africa and of Magna Græcia. They were eagerly sought after by some of the races whom the Greeks considered barbarous, by the Græco-Scythians of the Crimea, as well as by the Sabellians and the Etruscans; the latter imitated them now and then more or less awkwardly, but it is unanimously acknowledged that they are an essentially Greek product, the product of an art which sprang up with the first awakening of the Greek genius, and was extinguished about two hundred years before Christ, when the nation ceased to be creative and prolific. From analogy with all that has passed elsewhere we are justified in believing that, in each century, the painting of these vases, which would belong to what we call the industrial arts, followed with docility the example set by historical painters, and that it reproduced, so far as its resources would allow, the style and taste of their works. If we study each series of vases in the light of the judgments passed by the ancients upon the most celebrated painters of Greece, we may find, by a legitimate induction, traces now of the style of Polygnotus, now of that of Zeuxis, and again suggestions of the hands of Apelles or Protogenes; a vase here and there may have even preserved more or less faithful imitations of the actual works of those masters. These inductions and conjectures certainly demand both prudence and delicacy of perception, but their principle is incontestable, and the profit to be obtained from them is great. In the whole wreck of antiquity there is no loss which lovers of art find so hard to bear, as the complete annihilation of the works of those great painters whom the ancients put at least upon the same level as their most famous sculptors; and who would not rejoice to be able, by the remains of contemporary though inferior productions, to trace a reflection, distant and feeble perhaps, but yet faithful so far as it goes, of a whole art which has been lost to the world?

The archæologists of the eighteenth century never dreamt of such researches as these, still less of the results to which they might lead; few of them suspected what valuable aid might be afforded to the historian of art and of antique civilization, by the multitude of small objects—vases, gems, glass, mirrors, bronze plaques and figures, terra-cotta bas-reliefs, and statuettes—which are now so eagerly sought after, and which begin to form valuable collections in most of the great museums of Europe.[19] These objects, which were in continual use, were manufactured in prodigious quantities for thousands of years, and their vast numbers gave them a greatly increased chance of being preserved. In spite of the rough usage of man, and the slower progress of destruction due to the action of nature, a certain number of them were sure, from the first, to find means of escape, and, from so many examples, a few of each type have therefore come down to us. The small size of these objects also contributed to preserve them from destruction. In times of war and revolution the poor and humble ones of the earth easily avoid the catastrophes which overwhelm those who are richer, more powerful, and more conspicuous than themselves. So it was with these little memorials of antiquity. Their insignificance was their salvation in the overthrow of the civilisation to which they belonged. More numerous and better sheltered than the masterpieces of fine art, they survived when the latter perished. Thus it is that so many of the lighter and more fragile products of industry have survived to our time, and have made us acquainted with modes of thought and life, and with forms of plastic expression which we should never have known without them. The painted vases, for instance, have preserved for us more than one myth of which no trace can be found in poetry or sculpture; and as for terra-cottas, to which the Tanagra statuettes have directed so much attention, we may judge from the labours of M. Henzey of the value which they possess for archæologists, who, though unable, like some of our amateurs, to buy them with their weight in gold, may compare them one with another and study their smallest details.[20] Those statuettes, which are now classified in museums in the order of their production, have shown us how narrow and inadequate were the formulæ by which the early historians of the plastic arts attempted to define the genius of the Greeks. Even now, the most accomplished and well-informed critics are not always able to repress a feeling of astonishment when they examine a collection of terra-cottas. Some of these figures, no more than a span high, resemble the marbles of the Parthenon in dignity and grandeur, others are full of grace and playfulness in their outlines, and show a capricious abandon which disconcerts for a moment even those who are least insensible to their charm. At the bases of such works one is apt to look for the signature of some artist of the Renaissance or of the eighteenth century. In reality they have existed ever since the fourth or third century before our era, and yet there is something modern in their appearance. But an indescribable purity of taste suffices to betray their real origin to all those who possess knowledge and delicate perceptions. That origin is still Greece, but Greece in her lighter and more playful moments, when, leaving the representation of gods and heroes, she condescends to treat the familiar objects of domestic life, and does it with an ease of which her great writers, notably Plato and Aristophanes, had also found the secret, when they passed from epic tragedy to comedy, from the noblest eloquence to hearty expressions of enjoyment.

These little statues interest the historian for other reasons also. They sometimes give him, as at Tanagra, the most precise and accurate information as to dress and social customs: sometimes, as at Tegæa, they afford particulars of a famous though obscure form of worship, of a divinity and of rites which are but imperfectly described in the writings of classic authors.

This extension of knowledge and the great discoveries upon which it was based, naturally led those who were interested in the study of the remains of antique civilisation, to feel the necessity of organisation, of division of labour, and of the importance of ensuring a steady supply of the best and most trustworthy information. Societies were therefore founded in many different centres with the express object of meeting those wants. We cannot, of course, enumerate them here, nor attempt to estimate their various claims to our gratitude, but we may be permitted to allude to the good work accomplished, during fifty years of incessant activity, by the Association which has perhaps done more than any other for the progress of archæology, we mean the Instituto di Corrispondenza Archeologica, founded in Rome in 1829, by Bunsen, Gerhard, and the Duc de Luynes. Thanks to the breadth of view which characterised its founders, this society has been, ever since its inauguration, an international one in the best sense of the word; it brings together for a common end the most eminent European savants and their best pupils; it finds fellow-labourers and correspondents in every country. With their aid it soon established a Bullettino, where, month by month, all discoveries of interest made at any point of the Mediterranean basin were registered; and volumes, called sometimes Annali, sometimes Memorie, in which really important discoveries, and the problems to which they give rise, were discussed. Some of these dissertations are so elaborate and so full of valuable matter as to have formed epochs in the history of science. They are accompanied by fine plates, which, by their size, permit the reproduction of objects of art on a grander scale, and with more fidelity, than had been previously attempted.[21]

While the Roman Instituto was thus devoting itself to research, and assuring to its members the advantages of a regular publicity, these inquiries were daily attracting a more considerable share of attention from the other learned bodies of Europe. The Académie des Inscriptions et de Belles Lettres, the Academies of Berlin, Munich, and Vienna, devoted an ever-increasing portion of their programmes to such studies. Men began everywhere to understand that the writings of the classic authors, which had been so exhaustively studied ever since the Renaissance, were no longer capable of affording fresh information. In order to learn more of antiquity than the great scholars of the last three centuries, it was necessary to penetrate into the past by paths as yet unexplored; it was necessary to complement and control the evidence of classic authors by that of public and private inscriptions, engraved upon bronze, marble, or stone; it was above all necessary to seek for the expression, in their handiwork, of the wants and ideas, of the personal sentiments and religious conceptions, of the men of antiquity. There are, in fact, nations, such as the Etruscans, whose whole literature has perished, who are only known to us by the relics of their art. Others, like the Greeks and Latins, have indeed transmitted to us noble masterpieces of literature; but these masterpieces are few in proportion to those which time has destroyed. Of the thoughts which they expressed in their immortal languages, too many have been lost for ever with the fragile strips of papyrus to which they were confided.

With the ardour for knowledge and the heroic perseverance which are among the virtues of our time, curiosity has refused to resign itself to such a loss. It has determined to discover the unpublished, to draw into the light all that has not perished beyond recovery, to collect all that the spirit of antiquity has left behind it, either upon works hitherto unnoticed, or upon those which have been imperfectly understood. The treasures of epigraphy have been classified and shown in their full value by Bœckh, Borghesi, and others, and the world is now able to guess all that history may owe to them. The study, however, of those remains which bear figured representations is still more complex and formidable. The language of forms is, in itself, less definite than that of words, and it becomes very difficult to decipher when we have no words dealing with the same ideas to help us, when we possess the art of a people without a line of their literature. Another difficulty springs from the very abundance and variety of the materials to our hand. We feel oppressed by the ever-growing accumulation of facts, and can neither determine where to begin our work, nor how to leave it off: we cannot see the forest for the trees!