Objections have been brought against this doctrine of which Herr Conze himself has recognized the gravity; by numerous examples taken from the art of nations which do not belong to the Aryan family, it has been shown that, human nature being the same everywhere, all those peoples whose development has been normal, neither interrupted nor accelerated by external causes, have, at some period of their lives, turned to the style in question for the decoration of their weapons, of their earthenware, their furniture, their apparel and their personal ornaments. The less richly endowed among them would have stopped at that point but for the example of their neighbours, who stirred them on to new attempts and further progress; others advanced without impulse from other sources than their own instincts, they reproduced vegetable and animal forms, and finally the human figure in all its beauty and n.o.bility. It was the same with letters. Among the nations which have made a name in history how few there are that possess a true literature, a poetry at once inspired and critical! All however, under one form or another, have a popular poetry which is more or less varied and expressive.
The trace of this earliest spontaneous effort, of this first nave product of the imagination, never entirely disappears in a literature which is life-like and sincere; it is found even in the most perfect works of its cla.s.sic period. In the same way the most advanced and refined forms of art draw a part of their motives and effects from geometrical decoration. This style therefore should be studied both for its principle and for the resources of which it disposes, but as we shall have to notice it when we treat of Greece, it seems to us better to adjourn till then any discussion of its merits. Both in Greece and Italy approximate dates can be given to the monuments which it ornaments, they can be placed in their proper historical position, which is by no means the case with the objects gleaned throughout central Europe.
There is another consideration of still greater importance; the artistic remains of Greece form an almost unbroken series, from the humble and timid attempts of nascent sculpture to the brilliant masterpieces of Phidias and Polycletus, and show the steps by which the artist succeeds in pa.s.sing from one style to another, from curves and interlacing lines, from all mere abstract combinations, to the imitation of nature, to the representation of bodies which breathe, feel, and speak, which move and struggle. Elsewhere force has either been wanting for this development, or evidence of the transition has escaped our researches. Nothing can be much more imperfect or more conventional than the figures which we find upon some of the painted vases from Mycenae and Cyprus,[31] upon which the workman"s hand, accustomed to straight lines and circles, or segments of circles, has succeeded in suggesting by those means the figures of birds and fighting men. Nothing could be farther from the subtlety and variety of the contours presented by living organisms. But in spite of all this, art was born with the awakening of this desire to reproduce the beauty and mobility of living forms. All that had preceded it was but the vague murmuring of a wish which had not yet become self conscious; but, at last the intellect divined the use to which it might be put, and guessed at the part which might be played by the plastic instincts with which it felt itself endowed. All the rest depended upon natural gifts, upon time and circ.u.mstance; the march along the road of progress began, and although its rapidity was intermittent, it was certain to arrive, if not always at the production of masterpieces of divine beauty, at least at sufficient competence in painting and modelling to transmit the types of a race and the images of its G.o.ds to posterity.
[31] SCHLIEMANN, _Mycenae_, see figs. 33 and 213; CESNOLA, _Cyprus_, see pls. 44 and 46.
The student of plastic art finds in the remains of prehistoric times rather a tendency to the creation of art, than art itself; by postponing our study of this tendency until we come to investigate the origin of Greek and Italian art, we are enabled to avoid all excursion beyond the limits implied by our t.i.tle, beyond that which is generally called antiquity. The conventional meaning of this word embraces neither the primitive savages who chipped the first flint, nor the cave-men, but it calls up before our eyes the brilliant cities of northern Africa and hither-Asia, of Greece and Italy, with which our school-days have made us familiar; it reminds us of those nations whose stories we learnt from the sacred and profane authors whose works we read in our youth; and our thoughts revert to their grandiose monuments of architecture and sculpture, to their masterpieces of poetry and eloquence, to those great works of literature in which we took our first lessons in the art of writing and speaking. Behind all these images and a.s.sociations the intelligence of an educated man tells him--and the discoveries of science every day make the fact more certain--that in the ancient as in the modern world, the nations which figure upon the stage of history were not isolated; they each had neighbours who influenced them, or whom they influenced, by commerce or conquest; each also received something from its predecessors, and in turn transmitted the results of its labour to those which came after it; in a word, the work of civilization was continuous and universal. The nations which, for three or four thousand years, were grouped round the basin of the Mediterranean, belonged to one historical system; to those who take a wide grasp of facts they are but the members and organs of one great body, in which the nervous centres, the sources of life, of movement and of thought, slowly gravitated with the effluxion of time from the east to the west, from Memphis and Babylon to Athens and Rome.
As for the populations which, long before the opening of this period and during the whole of its duration, lived on the north of the Danube, the Alps, and the Pyrenees, they do not belong to the same system; they were attached to it by the Roman conquest, but at a very late period; not long, indeed, before the triumph of Christianity, the invasion of the barbarians, and the fall of the empire, led to the dissolution of the antique system and the subst.i.tution for it, after centuries of confusion and violence, of the wider and more comprehensive civilization of modern Europe, a civilization which was destined to cross every sea and to spread itself over the whole surface of the globe. As soon as the victories of the Roman legions, and the construction of the great roads which united Rome with her most distant provinces, had brought them into constant communication with the maritime cities of the Mediterranean, these barbaric nations, who had neither history, nor letters, nor expressive art, received them from their conquerors, whose very language they all, or nearly all, adopted; and for all this they gave practically nothing in return. Elsewhere, the old world had almost finished its task. It had exhausted every form in which those ideas and beliefs could be clothed which it had kept unchanged, or little changed, for millenium after millenium. The old world employed such force and vitality as remained to it in giving birth to the new, to that religion which has led to the foundation of our modern social and political systems. These also were to have their modes of expression, rich and sonorous enough, but dominated by a.n.a.lysis; they were to have arts and literatures, which have given expression to far more complex ideas than those of antiquity. The Celts and Teutons, the Slavs and Scandinavians, all those tribes which the Romans called barbarous, have, in spite of the apparent poverty of their share, made an important contribution to the civilization into which they plunged at so late a period, when they did so much to provide a foundation for those modes of thought and feeling which are only to be found in modern society.
These races do not belong, then, to what we call antiquity. They are separated from it by many things; they have no history, they have neither literary and scientific culture nor anything that deserves the name of art. Hidden behind a thick curtain of mountains and forests, sprinkled over vast regions where no towns existed, they remained in their isolation for thousands of years, furnishing to civilization nothing but a few rough materials which they themselves knew not how to use; they took no part in the work which, throughout those ages, was being prosecuted in the great basin of the Persian Gulf and the Mediterranean, in that acc.u.mulation of inventions and creations which, fixed and preserved by writing and realized by art, form the common patrimony of the most civilized portion of the human species. When, at a late hour, these nations entered upon the scene, it was as disturbers and destroyers,--and although they helped to found modern society, they produced none of those elements left to us by antiquity and preserved for us by that Rome in whose hands the heritage of Greece was concentrated.
V.
We have different, but equally valid, reasons for leaving that which is called the far East--India, China, and j.a.pan--outside the limit of our studies. Those rich and populous countries have, doubtless, a civilization which stretches back nearly as far as that of Egypt and a.s.syria, a civilization which has produced works both of fine and of industrial art which in many respects equalled those of the nations with which we are now occupied. In all those countries there are buildings which impress by their ma.s.s and by the marvellous delicacy of their ornamentation, sculptures of a singular freedom and power, and decorative painting which charms by its skilful use of brilliant colour as well as by the facility and inventive fancy of its design.
The representation of the human figure has never reached the purity of line or n.o.bility of expression of a Greek statue, but, on the other hand, the science of decoration has never been carried farther than by the wood-carvers, weavers and embroiderers of Hindostan, and the potters of China and j.a.pan.
These styles have their fanatical admirers who see nothing but their brilliant qualities; they have also their detractors, or at least their severe judges, who are chiefly struck by their shortcomings, but no one attempts to deny that each of those nations possesses an art which is always original, and sometimes of great and rare power. Why then, it may be asked, do we refuse to comprehend the more ancient monuments of India and China, those which by their age belong to the centuries with which we are concerned, in this work? Our motives may be easily divined.
We might allege our incompetence for such an extended task, which would be enough to occupy several lives. But we have a still more decisive reason. Neither Aryan India nor Turanian China belongs to the antiquity which we have defined, and as for Indo-China and j.a.pan they are but annexes to those two great nations; religion, written characters, the industrial and plastic arts--all came to them from one or the other of those two great centres of civilization.
So far as China is concerned no doubt or hesitation is possible. Down almost to our own days China and its satellites had no dealings with the western group of nations. It is a human family which has lived in voluntary isolation from the rest of its species. It is separated from western mankind by the largest of the continents, by deserts, by the highest mountains in the world, by seas once impa.s.sable, finally, by that contempt and hatred of everything foreign which such conditions of existence are calculated to engender. In the course of her long and laborious existence China has invented many things. She was the first to discover several of those instruments and processes which, in the hands of Europeans, have, in a few centuries, changed the face of the world; not only did she fail to make good use of her inventions, she guarded them so closely that the West had to invent them anew. We may cite printing as an example; nearly two hundred years before our era the Chinese printed with blocks of wood. On the other hand, every useful discovery made in the period and by the group of nations to whom we mean to confine our attention, from the time of Menes and Ourkham, the first historic kings of Egypt and Chaldaea, to the latest of the Roman Emperors, has been turned to the profit of others than its authors, and forms, so to speak, part of the public wealth. A single alphabet, that which the Phnicians extracted from one of the forms of Egyptian writing, made the tour of the Mediterranean, and served all the nations of the ancient world in turn for preserving their thoughts and the idiom of their language. A system of numerals, of weights and measures, was invented in Babylon and travelled across Western Asia to be adopted by the Greeks, and, through the mediation of the Greek astronomers and geographers, has given us the s.e.xagesimal division which we still employ for the part.i.tion of a circ.u.mference into degrees, minutes and seconds.
From this point of view, then, there is a profound difference between Egypt or Chaldaea, and China. The most remote epochs in the history of China do not belong to antiquity as we have defined the term. Without knowing it or wishing it, all those nations included in our plan laboured for their neighbours and for their successors. Read as a whole, their history proves to us that they each played a part in the gradual elaboration of civilized life which was absolutely necessary to the total result. But when China is in question our impression is very different, our intellects are quite equal to imagining what the world would have been like had that Empire been absolutely destroyed centuries ago, with all its art, literature, and material wealth.
Rightly or wrongly, we should not expect such a catastrophe to have had any great effect upon civilization; we should have been the poorer by a few beautiful plates and vases, and should have had to do without tea, and that would have been the sum of our loss.
The case of India is different. Less remote than China, bathed by an ocean which bore the fleets of Egypt, Chaldaea, Persia, Greece and Rome, she was never beyond the reach of the western nations. The a.s.syrians, the Persians, and the Greeks carried their arms into the basin of the Indus, some portions of which were annexed for a time to those Empires which had their centre in the valley of the Euphrates and stretched westwards as far as the Mediterranean. There was a continuous coming and going of caravans across the plateau of Iran and the deserts which lie between it and the oases of Bactriana, Aria, and Arachosia, and through the pa.s.ses which lead down to what is now called the Punjab; between the ports of the Arabian and Persian gulfs and those of the lower Indus and the Malabar coast, a continual commercial movement went on which, though fluctuating with time, was never entirely interrupted. From the latter regions western Asia drew her supplies of aromatic spices, of metals, of precious woods, of jewels, and other treasures, all of which came mainly by the sea route.
All this, however, was but the supply of the raw material for Egyptian, a.s.syrian, and Phnician industries. There is no evidence that up to the very last days of antique civilization the inhabitants of Hindostan with all their depths and originality of thought ever exercised such influence upon their neighbours as could have made itself felt as far as Greece. The grand lyric poetry of the Vedas, the epics and dramas of the following epoch, the religious and philosophical speculations, those learned grammatical a.n.a.lyses which are now admired by philologists, all the rich and brilliant intellectual development of a race akin to the Greeks and in many ways no less richly endowed, remained shut up in that basin of the Ganges into which no stranger penetrated until the time of the Mohammedan conquest. Neither Egyptians, Arabs nor Phnicians reached the true centres of Hindoo civilization; they merely visited those sea-board towns where the mixed population was more occupied with commerce than with intellectual pursuits. The conquerors previous to Alexander did no more than reach the gates of India and reconnoitre its approaches, while Alexander himself failed to penetrate beyond the vestibule.
Let us suppose that the career of the Macedonian hero had not been cut short by the fatigues and terrors of his soldiers. So far as we can judge from what Megasthenes tells us of Palibothra, the capital of Kalac.o.ka, the most powerful sovereign in the valley of the Ganges in the time of Seleucus Nicator, the Greeks would not, even in that favoured region, have found buildings which they could have studied with any profit, either for their plan, construction, or decoration.
Recent researches have proved Megasthenes to be an intelligent observer and an accurate narrator, and he tells us that in the richest parts of the country the Hindoos of his time had nothing better than wooden houses, or huts of pise or rough concrete. The palace of the sovereign, at Palibothra, impressed the traveller by its situation, its great extent, and the richness of its apartments. It was built upon an artificial, terraced mound, in the midst of a vast garden. It was composed of a series of buildings surrounded by porticos, which contained large reception halls separated from one another by courtyards in which peac.o.c.ks and tame panthers wandered at will. The columns of the princ.i.p.al saloons were gilt. The general aspect was very imposing. The arrangements seem to have had much in common with those of the a.s.syrian and Persian palaces. But there was one capital distinction between the two; at Palibothra the residence of the sovereign, like those of his subjects, was built of wood. With its commanding position, and the fine ma.s.ses of verdure with which it was surrounded, it must have produced a happy and picturesque effect, but, after all, it was little more than a collection of kiosques.
Architecture, worthy of the name, began with the employment of those solid and durable materials which defend themselves against destruction by their weight and constructive repose.
The other arts could not have been much more advanced. Ignorant as they were of the working of stone for building, these people can hardly have been sculptors, and as to their painting, we have no information. There is, moreover, no allusion to works of painting or sculpture in their epics and dramas, there are none of those descriptions of pictures and statues which, in the writings of the Greek poets and dramatists, show us that the development of the plastic arts followed closely upon that of poetry. This difference between the two races may perhaps be explained by the opposition between their religions and, consequently, their poetry. In giving to their G.o.ds the forms and features of men, the oldest of the Greek singers sketched in advance the figures to be afterwards created by their painters and sculptors. Homer furnished the sketch from which Phidias took his type of the Olympian Jupiter. It was not so with the Vedic hymns. In them the persons of the G.o.ds had neither consistence nor tangibility. They are distinguished now by one set of qualities and again by another; each of the immortals who sat down to the banquet on Olympus, had his or her own personal physiognomy, described by poets and interpreted by artists, but it was not so with the Hindoo deities. The Hindoo genius had none of the Greek faculty for clear and well-defined imagery; it betrays a certain vagueness and want of definition which is not to be combined with a complete apt.i.tude for the arts of design. It is the business of these arts to render ideas by forms, and a well marked limit is the essence of form, which is beautiful and expressive in proportion as its contours are clearly and accurately drawn.
Indian art then, for the reasons which we have given, and others which are unknown, was only in its cradle in the time of Alexander, while the artists of Greece were in full possession of all their powers; they had already produced inimitable master-pieces in each of the great divisions of art, and yet their creative force was far from being exhausted. It was the age of Lysippus and Apelles; of those great architects who, in the temples of Asia Minor, renewed the youth of the Ionic order by their bold and ingenious innovations. Under such conditions, what would the effect have been, had these two forms of civilization entered into close relations with each other? In all probability the result would have been similar to that which ensued when the ancestors of the Greeks began to deal with the more civilized Phnicians and the people of Asia Minor. But in the case of the Hindoos, as we have said, the disciples had a less, instead of a greater, apt.i.tude for the plastic arts than their teachers, and, moreover, the contact between the two was never complete nor was it of long duration. The only frontier upon which the interchange of idea was frequent and continuous was the north-west, which divided India from that Bactrian kingdom of which we know little more than the mere names of its princes and the date of its fall. But before the end of the second century B.C. this outpost of h.e.l.lenism had fallen before the attacks of those barbarians whom we call the Saci. In such an isolated position it could not long hope to maintain itself, especially after the rise of the Parthian monarchy had separated it from the empire of the Seleucidae. Its existence must always have been precarious, and the mere fact that it did not succ.u.mb until the year 136 B.C. is enough to prove that several of its sovereigns must have been remarkable men. Should their annals ever be discovered they would probably form one of the strangest and most interesting episodes in the history of the Greek race.
Through the obscurity in which all the details are enveloped we can clearly perceive that those princes were men of taste. They were, as was natural, attached to the literature and the arts which reminded them of their superior origin and of that distant fatherland with which year after year it became more difficult to communicate.
Although they were obliged, in order to defend themselves against so many enemies, to employ those mercenary soldiers, Athenians, Thebans, Spartans and Cretans, which then overran Asia, and to pay them dearly for their services, they also called skilful artists to their court and kept them there at great expense; the beautiful coins which have preserved their images down to our day are evidence of this, the decoration of their cities, of their temples, and of their palaces must have been in keeping with these; everywhere no doubt were Corinthian and Ionic buildings, statues of the Greek G.o.ds and heroes mixed with those portraits and historic groups which had been multiplied by the scholars of Lysippus, wall paintings, and perhaps some of those easel pictures signed by famous masters, for which the heirs of Alexander were such keen compet.i.tors. Artisans, who had followed the Greek armies in their march towards the East with the object of supplying the wants of any colonies which might be established in those distant regions, reproduced upon their vases and in their terra-cotta figures the motives of the painting, the sculpture, and the architecture which they left behind; goldsmiths, jewellers and armourers cut, chased, and stamped them in metal. And it was not only the Greek colonists who employed their skill. Like the Scythian tribes among whom the Greek cities of the Euxine were planted, the nations to the north of India were astonished and delighted by the elegance of their ornament and the variety of its forms. They imported from Bactriana these products of an art which was wanting to them, and soon set themselves, with the help perhaps of foreign artists settled among them, to imitate Grecian design in the courts of the Indian rajahs.
That this was so is proved by those coins which bear on their reverse such Hindoo symbols as Siva with his bull, and on their obverse Greek inscriptions, and by the remains of what is now called Graeco-Buddhic art, an art which seems to have flourished in the upper valley of the Indus in the third or second century before our era. These remains, formerly much neglected, are now attracting much attention. They have been carefully studied and described by Cunningham[32]; Dr. Curtius has described them and published reproductions of the most curious among them.[33] They are found in the north of the Punjab upon a few ancient sites where excavations have been made. Some of them have been transported to Europe in the collection of Dr. Leitner, while others remain in the museums of Peshawur, Lah.o.r.e, and Calcutta.[34] In those sacred buildings which have been examined the plan of the Greek temple has not been adopted, but the isolated members of Greek architecture and the most characteristic details of its ornament are everywhere made use of. It is the same with the sculpture; in the selection of types, in the arrangement of drapery, in the design, there is the same mixture of Greek taste with that of India, of elements borrowed from foreign, and those drawn from the national, beliefs. The helmeted Athene and Helios in his quadriga figure by the side of Buddha.
[32] _Archaeological Survey of India_, 3 vols. 1871-73.
[33] _Archaeologische Zeitung_, 1876, p. 90. _Die Griechische Kunst in Indien._
[34] The Louvre has lately acquired some curious examples of this art.
Traces of the same influence are to be found in a less marked degree in other parts of India. Near the mouth of the Indus and upon the Malabar coast, the native sculptors and architects were able to obtain more than one useful suggestion, more than one precious hint as to their technique, from the works of art brought in the ships of maritime traders. It is even possible that Greek workmen may thus have been introduced into seaport towns, and there employed upon the decoration of palaces and temples. However this may be it is incontestable that all the important sacred edifices of that region, whether stone-built or carved in the living rock, date from a period more recent than that of Alexander, and that most of them show details which imply acquaintance with Greek architectural forms and their imitation. We are thus on all hands forced to this conclusion: that, in the domain of the plastic arts, Greece owed nothing to India, with which she made acquaintance very late and at a period when she had no need to take lessons from others. That, moreover, India had little or nothing to give; that her arts were not developed till after her early relations with Greece, and it would even seem that her first stimulus was derived from the models which Greece put within her reach.
From all this it will be seen that we need not go as far as China, or even as the Punjab, in order to explain the origin of Greek art.
During the period with which we are concerned, China might as well have been in the planet Saturn for all she had to do with the ancient world, and we need refer to her no more, except now and then perhaps for purposes of ill.u.s.tration. We cannot treat India quite in the same fashion, because there were, as we have said, certain points of contact and reciprocal influences at work between her and the group of nations we are about to treat. But as Greece borrowed nothing from India, at least in the matter of art, the little which we shall have to say of the products of the Hindoos will not be connected with our discussion of the origin of Greek art. A curious though hardly an important episode in history, is seen in the reaction by which the Greek genius, when arrived at maturity, threw itself at the command of Alexander upon that East from which it had received its first lessons.
None of those philosophical discussions to which Ottfried Muller and Stark thought it necessary to give so large a place will be found in our introduction; both of those authors devoted a long chapter to the definition of art and its princ.i.p.al manifestations. Stark went so far as to discuss, with much patience and ingenuity, the definitions of art and of its essential forms which had been given by previous writers. We shall attempt nothing of the kind; we have not undertaken a work of criticism or aesthetic demonstration. We wish to build up the history of ancient civilization through the study, description, and comparison of its plastic remains.
Neither do we feel sure that, in such a question as this, definitions do not lead to confusion rather than to clearness. When short, they are vague and obscure, and only acquire precision through distinctions and developments which have to be discussed at length; and again they generally lead, on one hand or the other, either to objections or reservations. _Omnis definitio in jure periculosa_, says an old maxim, which is certainly true in matters of art. Why should we attempt, unless we are obliged, to define terms which awake sufficiently clear and distinct ideas in all cultivated minds? No satisfactory definition has ever been given of the word _architecture_, and yet, when we use it, every one knows what we mean. Architecture, sculpture, painting, each of these sounds has a precise meaning for those to whom our work is addressed, and we may say the same of certain other expressions, such as _industrial arts_, _decoration_, _style_, _historical painting_, _genre painting_, _landscape painting_, which will often be found in our pages. We must refer those who want definitions of these phrases to the _Grammaire des Arts du Dessin_ of M. Charles Blanc and kindred works. It will suffice for us that these words should be taken in the ordinary meaning which they bear in the conversation of cultivated men. If our ideas of art and its different branches diverge here and there from those which are commonly received, those divergencies will become evident, and will be discussed and justified to the best of our ability as the work proceeds. But on all occasions we shall do our best to avoid the abstract and pedantic terminology which makes Ottfried Muller"s first chapter so difficult to read.
We have now declared the aim of our work and the route which we propose to follow. In order to increase our chances of success, I have sought and obtained the collaboration of M. Charles Chipiez, whose special knowledge is well calculated to neutralise my own deficiencies. To his _Histoire critique des Origines et de la Formation des Ordres grecques_, was awarded, in 1877, one of the highest prizes of the Academie des Inscriptions, and in the Salons of 1878 and 1879 he confirmed his double reputation as a skilful draughtsman and a learned theorist; his _Essais de Restoration d"un Temple grecque hypethre, et des tours a etages de la Chaldee_, was much noticed and discussed by connoisseurs. It would not be fitting, however, to praise it here. I must confine myself to saying how fortunate I am in having obtained a help which I have found more helpful, more single-minded, more complete, than I had dared to hope for. In all that has to do with architecture, I have not written a line until after consulting M. Chipiez upon all technical points. He has also taken an active part in the revision of the text of certain chapters. As for the plates and ill.u.s.trations in the text, we have together chosen the objects to be represented, and M. Chipiez, as a professional man and able draughtsman, has personally superintended the execution of the drawings. It remains for me to explain the _role_ which we have a.s.signed to our ill.u.s.trations.
VI.
In the single edition of his great work which appeared during his own lifetime, Winckelmann inserted but a small number of ill.u.s.trations, and those for ornament rather than for instruction. One of his translators, M. Huber, tells us that their execution gave great dissatisfaction to the author.[35] In our days, on the other hand, those who undertake a work of this kind make use of the great progress which has taken place in engraving and typography, to insert numerous figures in their text, to which they offer an indispensable and animated commentary. Without their help many descriptions and observations might remain unnecessarily obscure and doubtful. When forms are to be defined and compared, mere words, in whatever language spoken or written, can never suffice.
[35] _Histoire de l"Art_; Huber"s preface to his translation, p. x.x.xii.
With well chosen phrases we may awake the recollections of others, and give renewed life to any impression which they may have received from some striking natural phenomenon or some fine work of art. Their imaginations will call up for a moment some landscape, picture, or statue which has formerly charmed them. But if we wish to explain the complicated plan of some great building, its design and its proportions, the slightest sketch will be of more use than the longest and most minute descriptions. So it will, if we wish to make clear the characteristics which distinguish one style from another, the a.s.syrian from the Egyptian, the archaic Greek style from that of the Phidian epoch or of the decadence, an Ionic column from the Erechtheum from one of the same order treated by a Roman architect. Between the contour of a figure from a Memphite bas-relief and that of one from Nineveh, what difference is there? A tenth of an inch more or less, a slight difference in the sweep of a line in order to mark more strongly the junction of the thigh and the knee. If we placed three nude torsos side by side, one of the sixth century, another of the fifth century, and the third of the time of Hadrian, a practised eye would at once a.s.sign its true date to each, in accordance with the manner in which the skeleton was indicated under the flesh, and the muscles drawn over it and attached to it. Supposing that the same model had served all three artists, it would show in the one case a lively sentiment of form combined with some dryness and rigidity; in another a freer, larger, and more subtle treatment, and in the third a want of vigour and firmness: but it would be difficult to give by words a clear idea of what caused the difference. Between the contour which satisfies us and that which does not there is hardly the difference of a hair; by leaning a little harder with the chisel the aspect of the one surface might have been made identical with the other. By its double astragali, by the fine chiselling of its gorgerin, by the elegant curve which unites the two volutes, and by the general delicacy of its ornament, a capital from the Erechtheum is distinguished above a Roman Ionic capital; it is at once finer in design and richer in ornamentation: by the side of it a capital from the theatre of Marcellus or the Coliseum would look mean and poor.
The whole history of art consists of the succession of subtle changes like these, and it would be impossible to convey them to the reader by the utmost precision of technical language or the most brilliant and life-like descriptions. The best thing that can be done is to make one"s remarks in the presence of the statues, pictures and buildings concerned. But it is rarely that we find ourselves in such favourable conditions for teaching and explaining our ideas. But, in default of the objects themselves, we may at least give the most faithful images of them which can be obtained, and that we shall attempt to do throughout the course of this history.
We shall, then, give a large number of figures, in which absolute accuracy and justice of proportion will be aimed at rather than picturesque effects. It is not very long since, in collections of drawings from antique remains, they were all presented under one aspect, so far as the subtleties of style were concerned. The hand of the engraver spread a technical uniformity over them all in which differences of school and date disappeared, just as the delicate carvings and coloured ornament of the middle ages and the renaissance, which gave to each building an individuality of its own, were reduced to dull monotony by the undiscriminating brush of the whitewasher. It seemed to the artist natural enough to clothe the monuments of the past in the style of his own day--and it required much less care than would have been needed for the successful expression of all the diversities of style in his models. We have now, however, grown more exacting. We demand from the draughtsman who pretends to interpret a work of art the same devotion and the same self-sacrifice as from the writer who is charged with the translation of a work of literature from one language into another--we require him to forget himself, so that we may say of him, as the Latin poet says of his _Proteus_:
"_Omnia transformat sese in miracula rerum._"
We require him to change his style with every change of subject, to copy the gesture, the accent, and even the faults of his model; to be Chinese in China, Greek in Greece, and Tuscan when he takes us to Siena or Florence. But we have indicated an ideal which is not often reached. Every one of us has his preferences and natural affinities, every artist his own methods and personal modes of thought. One will be conspicuous for his interpretation of the n.o.bility and purity of the antique, another for his treatment of oriental art or of the elegance of our eighteenth century. But the mere enunciation of the principle is of value, for a great effect follows the praise which those who treat their model with scrupulous and intelligent respect are sure to obtain, and the blame to which they who are less conscientious expose themselves.
Fidelity in interpretation is, in fact, the honesty of the draughtsman; it may become, if carried to a great height, his honour, and even his glory. So far as we are concerned, we demand it from all those who are a.s.sociated with us in this task; and, so far as existing methods will allow, we shall see that we obtain it. Unless our ill.u.s.trations had that merit they would obscure the text instead of making it more comprehensible. Our readers would search in vain for the features and characteristics to which we might call their attention, and many of our remarks and theories would become difficult to understand. We should be in the same position as an incompetent barrister who has made a bad choice of witnesses; witnesses who, when in the box, prove either to know nothing or to know only facts which tell against the party who has called them.
Our aim in choosing our ill.u.s.trations will be to place before our readers good reproductions of most of the objects which are discussed in our text. We shall, of course, be unable to figure everything that is of interest, but we can at least ensure that those figures which we give shall each be interesting in some particular or another. So far as possible, we shall select for ill.u.s.tration such objects as have not previously been reproduced, or have been ill reproduced, or have been figured in works which are difficult of access. We shall sometimes, of course, find it necessary to reproduce some famous statue or some building which is familiar to most people; but even then we shall endeavour to give renewed interest to their beauties by displaying them under some fresh aspect and by increased care in the delineation of their forms. Views in perspective, of which we shall make frequent use, give the general aspect of buildings with much greater truth and completeness than a mere plan, or a picturesque sketch of ruinous remains, or even than an elevation.
Most of the more important perspectives and restorations due to the learned pencil of M. Chipiez will be given in plates separate from the text, as well as the most curious or significant of the works in sculpture or painting to which we shall have to refer. Some of these plates will be coloured. But the majority of our ill.u.s.trations will consist of engravings upon zinc and wood, which will not, we hope, fall short of their more elaborate companions in honesty and fidelity.
From the earliest Egyptian dynasties and from fabled Chaldaea to imperial Rome, from the Pyramids and the Tower of Babel to the Coliseum, from the Statue of Chephren and the bas-reliefs of Shalmaneser III, to the busts of the Caesars, from the painted decorations of the tomb of Ti, and the enamelled bricks of Nineveh to the wall-paintings of Pompeii, we shall review in due succession all the forms which the great nations of antiquity made use of to express their beliefs, to give shape to their ideas, to satisfy their instincts for luxury and their taste for beauty, to lodge their G.o.ds and their kings, and to transmit their own likenesses to posterity.
We propose to trace and explain the origin of, and to describe, without aesthetic dissertations or excessive use of technical terms, those processes which imply the practice of art; the creation and descent of forms; the continual changes, sometimes slight and sometimes great, which they underwent in pa.s.sing from one people to another, until, among the Greeks, they arrived at the most happy and complete perfection which the world has seen. We hope, too, by the judicious choice and careful execution of our figures, to give a fair idea of this course of development even to those artists who have neither time nor patience to follow our criticisms and descriptions.