Part 53

Parrhasius excelled in giving a roundness and a beautiful contour to his figures, and was remarkable for the richness and variety of his creations. His numerous pictures of gods and heroes attained the highest consideration in art. He was overcome, however, in a pictorial contest, in which the subject was the contest of Ulysses and Ajax for the arms of Achilles, by the ingenious Timanthes, in whose sacrifice of Iphigenia the ancients admired the expression of grief carried to that pitch of intensity at which art had only dared to hint. The most striking feature in the picture was the concealment of the face of Agamemnon in his mantle. (The concealment of the face of Agamemnon in this picture has been generally considered as a "trick" or ingenious invention of Timanthes, when it was the result of a fundamental law in Greek art--to represent alone what was beautiful, and never to present to the eye anything repulsive or disagreeable; the features of a father convulsed with grief would not have been a pleasing object to gaze on; hence the painter, fully conscious of the laws of his art, concealed the countenance of Agamemnon.) Timanthes was distinguished for his invention and expression. Before all, however, ranks the great Apelles, who united the advantages of his native Ionia--grace, sensual charms, and rich coloring--with the scientific accuracy of the Sicyonian school. The most prominent characteristic of his style was grace (charis), a quality which he himself avowed as peculiarly his, and which serves to unite all the other gifts and faculties which the painter requires; perhaps in none of his pictures was it exhibited in such perfection as in his famous Anadyomene, in which Aphrodite is represented rising out of the sea, and wringing the wet out of her hair. But heroic subjects were likewise adapted to his genius, especially grandly-conceived portraits, such as the numerous likenesses of Alexander, by whom he was warmly patronized. He not only represented Alexander with the thunderbolt in his hand, but he even attempted, as the master in light and shade, to paint thunderstorms, probably at the same time as natural scenes and mythological personifications. The Anadyomene, originally painted for the temple of Æsculapius, at Cos, was transferred by Augustus to the temple of D. Julius, at Rome, where, however, it was in a decayed state even at the time of Nero. Contemporaneously with him flourished Protogenes and Nicias. Protogenes was both a painter and a statuary, and was celebrated for the high finish of his works. His master-piece was the picture of Ialysus, the tutelary hero of Rhodes, where he lived. He is said to have spent seven years on it. Nicias, of Athens, was celebrated for the delicacy with which he painted females. He was also famous as an encaustic painter, and was employed by Praxiteles to apply his art to his statues. The glorious art of these masters, as far as regards light, tone, and local colors, is lost to us, and we know nothing of it except from obscure notices and later imitations. It is not thus necessary to speak at length of the various schools of painting in Greece, their works being all lost, the knowledge of the characteristics peculiar to each school would be at the present day perfectly useless. Painting had to follow the invariable law of all development; having reached a period of maturity, it followed, as a necessary consequence, that the period of decline should begin. The art of this period of refinement, Mr. Wornum writes, which has been termed the Alexandrian, because the most celebrated artist of this period lived about the time of Alexander the Great, was the last of progression, or acquisition, but it only added variety of effect to the tones it could not improve, and was principally characterized by the diversity of the styles of so many contemporary artists. The decadence of the arts immediately succeeded, the necessary consequence, when, instead of excellence, variety and originality became the end of the artist. The tendencies which are peculiar to this period gave birth sometimes to pictures which ministered to a low sensuality; sometimes to works which attracted by their effects of light, and also to caricatures and travesties of mythological subjects. The artists of this period were under the necessity of attracting attention by novelty and variety; thus rhyparography, and the lower classes of art, attained the ascendency, and became the characteristic styles of the period. In these Pyreieus was pre-eminent; he was termed rhyparographos, on account of the mean quality of his subjects. After the destruction of Corinth by Mummius and the spoliation of Athens by Sylla the art of painting experienced a rapid and total decay.

[Illustration: Engraved & Printed by Illman Brothers THE PHILÆ ISLANDS. FOR THE MUSEUM OF ANTIQUITY]

We shall now make a few extracts from Mr. Wornum's excellent article on the vehicles, materials, colors, and methods of painting used by the Greeks.

The Greeks painted with wax, resins, and in water-colors, to which they gave a proper consistency, according to the material upon which they painted, with gum, glue, and the white of egg; gum and glue were the most common.

They painted upon wood, clay, plaster, stone, parchment, and canvas. They generally painted upon panels or tables, and very rarely upon walls; and an easel, similar to what is now used, was common among the ancients. These panels, when finished, were fixed into frames of various descriptions and materials, and encased in walls. The ancients used also a palette very similar to that used by the moderns, as is sufficiently attested by a fresco painting from Pompeii, which represents a female painting a copy of Hermes, for a votive tablet, with a palette in her left hand.

The earlier Grecian masters used only four colors: the earth of Melos for white; Attic ochre for yellow; Sinopis, an earth from Pontus, for red; and lamp-black; and it was with these simple elements that Zeuxis, Polygnotus, and others of that age, executed their celebrated works. By degrees new coloring substances were found, such as were used by Apelles and Protogenes.

So great, indeed, is the number of pigments mentioned by ancient authors, and such the beauty of them, that it is very doubtful whether, with all the help of modern science, modern artists possess any advantage in this respect over their predecessors.

We now give the following list of colors, known to be generally used by ancient painters:

_Red._--The ancient reds were very numerous, cinnabar, vermilion, bisulphuret of mercury, called also by Pliny and Vitruvius, minium. The cinnabaris indica, mentioned by Pliny and Dioscorides, was what is vulgarly called dragon's blood, the resin obtained from various species of the calamus palm. Miltos seems to have had various significations; it was used for cinnabaris, minium, red lead, and rubrica, red ochre. There were various kinds of rubricæ; all were, however, red oxides, of which the best were the Lemnian, from the Isle of Lemnos, and the Cappadocian, called by the Romans rubrica sinopica, from Sinope in Paphlagonia. Minium, red oxide of lead, red lead, was called by the Romans cerussa usta, and, according to Vitruvius, sandaracha.

The Roman sandaracha seems to have had various significations. Pliny speaks of the different shades of sandaracha; there was also a compound color of equal parts of sandaracha and rubrica calcined, called sandyx, which Sir H. Davy supposed to approach our crimson in tint; in painting it was frequently glazed with purple, to give it additional lustre.

_Yellow._--Yellow-ochre, hydrated peroxide of iron, the _sil_ of the Romans, formed the base of many other yellows, mixed with various colors and carbonate of lime. Ochre was procured from different parts--the Attic was considered the best; sometimes the paler sort of sandaracha was used for yellow.

_Green._--Chrysocolla, which appears to have been green carbonate of copper, or malachite (green verditer), was the green most approved of by the ancients; there was also an artificial kind which was made from clay impregnated with sulphate of copper (blue vitriol) rendered green by a yellow dye. The commonest and cheapest colors were the Appianum, which was a clay, and the creta viridis, the common green earth of Verona.

_Blue._--The ancient blues were very numerous; the principal of these was coeruleum, azure, a species of verditer, or blue carbonate of copper, of which there were many varieties. The Alexandrian was the most valued, as approaching the nearest to ultramarine. It was also manufactured at Pozzuoli. This imitation was called coelon. Armenium was a metallic color, and was prepared by being ground to an impalpable powder. It was of a light blue color. It has been conjectured that ultramarine (lapis lazuli) was known to the ancients under the name of Armenium, from Armenia, whence it was procured. It is evident, however, from Pliny's description, that the "sapphirus" of the ancients was the lapis lazuli of the present day. It came from Media.

Indigo, indicum, was well known to the ancients.

_Purple._--The ancients had several kinds of purple, purpurissimum, ostrum, hysginum, and various compound colors. Purpurissimum was made from creta argentaria, a fine chalk or clay, steeped in a purple dye, obtained from the murex. In color it ranged between minium and blue, and included every degree in the scale of purple shades. The best sort came from Pozzuoli. Purpurissimum indicum was brought from India. It was of a deep blue, and probably was the same as indigo. Ostrum was a liquid color, to which the proper consistence was given by adding honey. It was produced from the secretion of a fish called ostrum, and differed in tint according to the country from whence it came; being deeper and more violet when brought from the northern, redder when from the southern coasts of the Mediterranean. The Roman ostrum was a compound of red ochre and blue oxide of copper. Hysginum, according to Vitruvius, is a color between scarlet and purple. The celebrated Tyrian dye was a dark, rich purple, of the color of coagulated blood, but, when held against the light, showed a crimson hue. It was produced by a combination of the secretions of the murex and buccinum. In preparing the dye the buccinum was used last, the dye of the murex being necessary to render the colors fast, while the buccinum enlivened by its tint of red the dark hue of the murex. Sir H. Davy, on examining a rose-colored substance, found in the baths of Titus, which in its interior had a lustre approaching to that of carmine, considered it a specimen of the best Tyrian purple. The purpura, as mentioned in Pliny, was an amethyst or violet color.

_Brown._--Ochra usta, burnt ochre.--The browns were ochres calcined, oxides of iron and manganese, and compounds of ochres and blacks.

_Black._--Atramentum, or black, was of two sorts, natural and artificial. The natural was made from a black earth, or from the secretion of the cuttle-fish, sepia. The artificial was made of the dregs of wine carbonized, calcined ivory, or lamp-black. The atramentum indicum, mentioned by Pliny, was probably the Chinese Indian ink.

_White._--The ordinary Greek white was melinum, an earth from the Isle of Melos; for fresco-painting the best was the African paroetonium. There was also a white earth of Eretria and the annularian white. Carbonate of lead, or white lead, cerussa, was apparently not much used by the ancient painters. It has not been found in any of the remains of painting in Roman ruins.

_Methods of Painting._--There were two distinct classes of painting practiced by the ancients--in water colors and in wax, both of which were practiced in various ways. Of the former the principal were fresco, al fresco; and the various kinds of distemper (a tempera), with glue, with the white of egg, or with gums (a guazzo); and with wax or resins when these were rendered by any means vehicles that could be worked with water. Of the latter the principal was through fire, termed encaustic.

Fresco was probably little employed by the ancients for works of imitative art, but it appears to have been the ordinary method of simply coloring walls, especially amongst the Romans. Coloring al fresco, in which the colors were mixed simply in water, as the term implies, was applied when the composition of the stucco on the walls was still wet (udo tectorio), and on that account was limited to certain colors, for no colors except earths can be employed in this way.

The fresco walls, when painted, were covered with an encaustic varnish, both to heighten the colors and to preserve them from the injurious effects of the sun or the weather. Vitruvius describes the process as a Greek practice. When the wall was colored and dry, Punic wax, melted and tempered with a little oil, was rubbed over it with a hard brush (seta); this was made smooth and even by applying a _cauterium_ or an iron pan, filled with live coals, over the surface, as near to it as was just necessary to melt the wax; it was then rubbed with a candle (wax) and a clean cloth. In encaustic painting the wax colors were _burnt into_ the ground by means of a hot iron (called cauterium) or pan of hot coals being held near the surface of the picture. The mere process of burning in constitutes the whole difference between encaustic and the ordinary method of painting with wax colors.

We shall now say a few words with regard to the much canvassed question of painting or coloring statues. Its antiquity and universality admit of no doubt. Indeed, the practice of painting statues is a characteristic of a primitive and workmanship of clay or wood. It was a survival of the old religious practices of daubing the early statues of the gods with vermilion, and was done to meet the superstitious tastes of the uneducated. Statues for religious purposes may have been painted in obedience to a formula prescribed by religion, but statues as objects of art, on which the sculptor exhibited all his genius and taste, were unquestionably executed in the pure and uncolored marble alone. In the chryselephantine, or ivory statues of Jove and Minerva, by Phidias, art was made a handmaid to religion. Phidias himself would have preferred to have executed them in marble.

We may further remark that form, in its purest ideal, being the chief aim of sculpture, any application of color, which would detract from the purity and ideality of this purest of the arts, could never be agreeable to refined taste. Coloring sculpture and giving it a life-like reality is manifestly trenching on the province of painting, and so departing from the true principle of sculpture, which is to give form in its most perfect and idealized development. We must also consider that sculpture in marble, by its whiteness, is calculated for the display of light and shade. For this reason statues and bas-reliefs were placed either in the open light to receive the direct rays of the sun, or in underground places, or thermæ, where they received their light either from an upper window, or, by night, from the strong light of a lamp, the sculptor having for that purpose studied the effects of the shadows. It must also be remembered that the statues in Greek and Roman temples received their light from the upper part of the building, many of the temples being hypæthral, thus having the benefit of a top light, the sculptor's chief aim. Color in these statues or bas-reliefs would have tended to mar the contrasts of light and shade, and blended them too much; for example, color a photograph of a statue, which exhibits a marked contrast of light and shade, and it will tend to confuse and blend the two. The taste for polychrome sculpture in the period of the decline of art was obviously but a returning to the primitive imperfection of art, when an attempt was made to produce illusion in order to please the uneducated taste of the vulgar.

The Romans derived their knowledge of painting from the Etruscans, their ancestors and neighbors; the first Grecian painters who came to Italy are said to have been brought over by Demaratus, the father of Tarquinius Priscus, King of Rome; at all events Etruria appears to have exercised extensive influence over the arts of Rome during the reign of the Tarquins. Tradition attributes to them the first works which were used to adorn the temples of Rome, and, according to Pliny, not much consideration was bestowed either on the arts or on the artists. Fabius, the first among the Romans, had some painting executed in the temple of Salus, from which he received the name of Pictor. The works of art brought from Corinth by Mummius, from Athens by Sulla, and from Syracuse by Marcellus, introduced a taste for paintings and statues in their public buildings, which eventually became an absorbing passion with many distinguished Romans. Towards the end of the republic Rome was full of painters. Julius Cæsar, Agrippa, Augustus, were among the earliest great patrons of artists. Suetonius informs us that Cæsar expended great sums in the purchase of pictures by the old masters. Under Augustus, Marcus Ludius painted marine subjects, landscape decorations, and historic landscape as ornamentation for the apartments of villas and country houses. He invented that style of decoration which we now call arabesque or grotesque. It spread rapidly, insomuch that the baths of Titus and Livia, the remains discovered at Cumæ, Pozzuoli, Herculaneum, Stabiæ, Pompeii, in short, whatever buildings about that date have been found in good preservation, afford numerous and beautiful examples of it. At this time, also, a passion for portrait painting prevailed; an art which flattered their vanity was more suited to the tastes of the Romans than the art which could produce beautiful and refined works similar to those of Greece. Portraits must have been exceedingly numerous; Varro made a collection of the portraits of 700 eminent men. Portraits, decorative and scene painting, seem to have engrossed the art. The example, or rather the pretensions, of Nero must also have contributed to encourage painting in Rome; but Roman artists were, however, but few in number; the victories of the consuls, and the rapine of the prætors, were sufficient to adorn Rome with all the master-pieces of Greece and Italy. They introduced the fashion of having a taste for the beautiful works of Greek art. At a later period, such was the corrupt state of taste, that painting was almost left to be practiced by slaves, and the painter was estimated by the quantity of work that he could do in a day.

The remains of painting found at Pompeii, Herculaneum, and in the baths of Titus, at Rome, are the only paintings which can give us any idea of the coloring and painting of the ancients, which, though they exhibit many beauties, particularly in composition, are evidently the works of inferior artists in a period of decline. At Pompeii there is scarcely a house the walls of which are not decorated with fresco paintings. The smallest apartments were lined with stucco, painted in the most brilliant and endless variety of colors, in compartments simply tinted with a light ground, surrounded by an ornamental margin, and sometimes embellished with a single figure or subject in the center, or at equal distances. These paintings are very frequently historical or mythological, but embrace every variety of subject, some of the most exquisite beauty. Landscape painting was never a favorite with the ancients, and if ever introduced in a painting, was subordinate. The end and aim of painting among the ancients was to represent and illustrate the myths of the gods, the deeds of heroes, and important historical events, hence giving all prominence to the delineation of the human form. Landscape, on the other hand, illustrated nothing, represented no important event deserving of record, and was thus totally without significance in a Grecian temple or pinacotheca. In an age of decline, as at Pompeii, it was employed for mere decorative purposes. Many architectural subjects are continually found in which it is easy to trace the true principles of perspective, but they are rather indicated than minutely expressed or accurately displayed; whereas in most instances a total want of the knowledge of this art is but too evident. Greek artists seem to have been employed; indeed, native painters were few, while the former everywhere abounded, and their superiority in design must have always insured them the preference.

The subjects of Roman mural paintings are usually Greek myths; in the composition and style we see Greek conception, modified by Roman influence. The style of drawing is rather dexterous than masterly; rapidity of execution seems to be more prized than faithful, conscientious representation of the truth of nature; the drawing is generally careless, and effects are sometimes produced by tricks and expedients, which belong rather to scene-painting than to the higher branches of art. It must not, however, be forgotten that the majority of these pictures were architectural decorations, not meant to be regarded as independent compositions, but as parts of larger compositions, in which they were inserted as in a frame. As examples of ancient coloring they are of the highest interest, and much may be learnt from them in reference to the technical materials and processes employed by ancient artists.

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SCULPTURING.

We do not intend to enter here on the history of sculpture in all its phases, but to give the distinctive features which characterize the different styles of Egyptian, Greek, and Roman sculpture, as they are visible in statues of the natural or colossal size, in statues of lesser proportion, and lastly in busts and bas-reliefs.

We shall give also the styles of each separate nation which prevailed at each distinct age or epoch, styles which mark the stages of the development of the art of sculpture in all countries. Sculpture, like architecture and painting, indeed all art, had an indigenous and independent evolution in all countries, all these arts springing up naturally, and taking their origin alike everywhere in the imitative faculty of man. They had their stages of development in the ascending and descending scales, their rise, progress, culminating point, decline and decay, their cycle of development; the sequence of these stages being necessarily developed wherever the spirit of art has arisen, and has had growth and progress. The first and most important step in examining a work of ancient sculpture is to distinguish with certainty whether it is of Egyptian, Etruscan, Greek, or Roman workmanship; and this distinction rests entirely on a profound knowledge of the style peculiar to each of those nations. The next step is, from its characteristic features, to distinguish what period, epoch, or stage of the development of the art of that particular nation it belongs to. We shall further give the various attributes and characteristics of the gods, goddesses, and other mythological personages which distinguish the various statues visible in Egyptian, Etruscan, Greek, and Roman sculpture.

This enumeration will be found of use in the many sculpture galleries of the various museums both at home and abroad.

Man _attempted_ sculpture long before he _studied_ architecture; a simple hut, or a rude house, answered every purpose as a place of abode, and a long time elapsed before he sought to invent what was not demanded by necessity.