NOV 12 1900 CAMBRIDGE, MASS THE RISE, PROGRESS, AND DECAY OF THE ART OF PAINTING IN GREECE. BY DR. PHENÉ, F.S.A., V.P.R.S.L., F.R.G.S., F.R.I.B.A., V.P. CITY OF LONDON COLLEGE, V.P. BRITISH ARCHAEOLOGICAL ASSOCIATION, F.G.S., ETC. [Read May 10th, 1899.] THE Persian war had ended The Lacedaemonians had signed the thirty years' truce Athens, by its naval supremacy, had become the unchallenged mistress of the Aegaean. She had removed, 465 years B.C., her immense wealth in gold from the sacred depository at Delos to her own temples. Her tributary revenue from the Aegaean islands was enormous. In this prosperity the Athenians showed wisdom, their levity was of a later date, and instead of seeking new enemies, or oppressing their tributaries, they instituted an age of art which surpassed in glory all their previous conquests, and to this day has served to refine and civilise mankind—a picture not unlike that of Great Britain and her colonies, arts and manufactures. The temptations which came before Alexander, of Macedonia, were almost similar, after he had obtained supremacy in Greece. But he left to VOL. XXI. 1 posterity merely a sounding name, and the history of a sea of blood. While the monuments of the Athenians, though in ruins, exist to this day as unique evidences of supremacy of the mind, exciting the love and admiration of mankind. The destruction by Xerxes had been so complete that restoration was impossible; while the magnitude and unequalled beauty of the works of the Athenians made this the beginning of the real art era. I have selected two places, one in Greece and one in Ionia, in Asia Minor, to avoid entering into the general subject of Graeco-Asian art in painting, to which this sketch may fairly act as an introduction. To attempt in a single reading to give a general description of Eastern art would be simply to frame a catalogue of names of men, places, and works of art produced by the one or at the other, as the case might be, and which, however useful as a reference, would be dull reading for an hour. That the cradle of such works, as in modern times are included in the term fine arts, was Greece, will hardly be questioned; but its painters and schools of painting are less known to us than its sculptors and its ateliers, the ergasteria-ipyaorńpia of the Greeks. Of the sculptures there are examples; of the paintings it is generally supposed there are none. A careful examination of the subject, following it step by step, materially reduces this conclusion; and I propose to lay before you the course I have followed to arrive at this. shall therefore select painting as an exponent of T Greek art, as in it are recorded its detailed progressions, which may be taken as examples of those of other arts. My investigations have been personal, and extend over many years. They were not planned, nor even intended to embrace this subject, but one so closely allied to it that it became impossible to dissociate them. And although at first the feature of painting simply came in incidentally, because it could not be overlooked, it so grew on the memory and filled the mind with fascinating thoughts, that, while closely associated with the matter of investigation out of which it grew, it gradually formed a distinct subject, and led to separate investigations through the peculiar interest it aroused. The original intention was to follow the localities. of Greek mythology to search for indications which might have caused the mythologists to invest certain localities with a sacredness which led to the dedication of such peculiar places to one or other of the Greek divinities; so that temples were erected in them to the special deities so selected, and the worship of such deities concentrated locally by the rites and attributes assigned to any special deity worshipped there. It was a curious and inspiring pursuit, and although started with no systematised conditions, soon so adjusted itself that, commenced without rule, the latter speedily governed the investigation with a force which proved the influence the localities in question must have exercised upon minds subjected by reverential awe, poetic joyance, and love of the beautiful which characterised the Greek nationalities in particular, and elevated them as a nation above all those of Oriental antiquity. The magnificence of the Parthenon faded before the temples of Nature's formation; the one is an exhibition of Man's power, the others of God's. Certain natural intelligences are necessary to appreciate this. The mind must be fixed upon the subject. It must be capable of entering into the hallowed precincts of Nature's temples. It must comprehend her exposition of the beautiful. The inquirer must be alone, and capable of comprehending the voices of Nature. Then, as at Delphi, Tempe, Olympos, he becomes initiated. No need for the darkened caverns of Eleusis, he is initiated into the visible light, airy scenes of living wonders of the spiritual in NATURE. He feels he can converse with her, he knows her voice, and henceforth there is the interchange, not of words, which often curtail instead of expanding ideas, but of thought, which, contrary to the tÉkvov of Nature, as shown by the descent of rivers from mountain summits, flows upwards with a force more overpowering than that of descending cataracts. The one may whirl away and annihilate the body, the other carries up the soul on impalpable and indestructible wings of happiness. So influenced, the conviction that the intellectual Greeks who became architects, sculptors, and poetical designers-for the poetry of beauty is in their works-must have painted, not only as graphees (ypapiec), but as colourists, is inevitable. The crowning glories of their acropoleis, the snow-white |