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female trinkets by Ulysses. There is an extraordinary vividness about this picture, and the conception, with all its mastery of detail, has led to the supposition that it might be a copy of an old Greek master, possibly Athenion, who, as we know from Pliny, painted this subject, and who, though he died young, attained great skill in his art. The excitement of Achilles stirred at the sound of the trumpet, the alarm of the beautiful Deidameia, the eagerness with which Ulysses, and probably Diomed, grasp Achilles by the arm, are rendered with great power and truth. Agyrtes blowing the trumpet was so damaged that this part of the picture, which Zahn, who was present at the excavation, still saw, was removed.

Among several curious pictures relating to the worship of Isis, there is one, found in the temple of Isis, representing the arrival of Io in Egypt, and illustrating the links which the Greeks found between the Egyptian cults and their own. Io, the heroine of Argos, symbolized the moon. She wandered over the world under the shape of a cow; and, though Isis was not originally a lunar goddess with the Egyptians, she was also represented with cow's horns, which led the Greeks to believe that she personified the moon. Herodotus, on visiting Egypt, first notices the likeness in form between Io and Isis. He remarks that he saw Isis with the cow's horns the same as the Greek lo. The Greeks, who tried to recognize their own gods in those of other nations, began to identify them. But it was not till long afterwards, under the Ptolemys, when Egyptian religion so deeply influenced Greek thought, and the myths themselves were changed to fit into the new order of ideas, that the notion crept in that Io, on arriving in Egypt after her wanderings, was worshipped there as the goddess Isis. On the picture she is represented as a beautiful woman with cow's horns, borne on the river Nile, and welcomed by Isis. The scene has all the Egyptian elements. We find the sphinx crowned with the lotus, the crocodile, the serpent; a priestess of Isis holding the sistrum - the musical instrument used in the worship of Isis the situla, a little receptacle with a handle for the holy Nile water, and the caduceus; Harpocrates the child Horus with his forefinger on his mouth, as we see the infant Christ on the old Italian pictures pointing to himself as the Word. A similar picture was found at Herculaneum, with slight variations in the details.

Among the importations from Egypt

are also the pigmies, which are chiefly represented to caricature humanity. A representation of a scene like Solomon's Judgment, where the pigmies are actors, has much exercised the minds of the critics. It is thought more probable that it represents some Egyptian occurrence than that it should have been taken from the Old Testament. Occasionally we find the pigmies in their own element the Nile, climbing up a palm-tree to escape from the inundation, or riding on a crocodile.

Landscapes, still life, or animals sometimes take the place of the figure-paintings. Among the still life there is a dish of figs with a glass water-bottle_the transparency of which is admirable. The Greek painter Pausias, who studied nature in all her aspects, may be pointed to as the model for this kind of composition. In Pausanias's time there was still at Epidaurus a picture by him of Methe (Drunkenness) drinking out of a glass bowl, through which her face could be seen. The animals are true to nature, and painted with much humor and delicacy in situations that are very probably taken out of fables. The landscapes either cover the whole wall — and this is generally a garden wall-or, like the figure-paintings, they form imitations of panel pictures. No less than seven hundred and fifty to eight hundred landscapes have been found at Pompeii, about fifty of which are on the walls of gardens or peristylia. They represent mythological subjects, sacred trees, seacoasts with towns or villas, gardens, sea views with naval battles, and sometimes Egyptian scenery.

The sacred trees are a very curious feature. They hold as conspicuous a place in the landscape-painting as in the worship of the ancients. Long before the temples made with hands, trees were the abodes of the divinities, and they remained inseparably associated with their worship. Those whom the gods loved and protected were often themselves changed into trees. There are many examples of these metamorphoses, but there is none that gives a better illustration than the charming story of Philemon and Baucis. Ovid tells how this poor but pious couple were the only inhabitants of Tyana in Phrygia, who received the disguised gods Zeus and Hermes after they had been turned away from every door. They offered them the best of what they had, and were rewarded for their hospitality by seeing their small hut transformed into a lofty temple, while the town disappeared in a marsh. They were, at their desire, made the guardians

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E'en yet an ancient Tyanean shows

A spreading oak, that near a linden grows;
The neighborhood confirm the prodigy
Grave men, not vain of tongue or like to lie.
I saw myself the garlands on their boughs
And tablets hung for gifts of granted vows;
And off'ring fresher up, with pious pray'r,
The good, said I, are God's peculiar care,
And such as honor heav'n, shall heavenly

honor share.*

was one of the last heathen superstitions that survived. Fathers of the Church and councils inveighed against it, and urged those who had sacred trees on their land to lay the axe to them; and as late as the eighth century an edict of the Lombard king Luitprand punished any one who had honored a so-called sacred tree with the confiscation of half his property.

The greater number of the landscapes represent coast scenery, and there are many representations of the villas which the Romans erected on the Bay of Naples in the latter days of the republic, and in the early days of the empire, and which Pliny the Younger describes in his letters. Some of them were built out on substructions in the sea, and their ruins may be seen even now, deep below the

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clear blue water on the Sorrento or Baiæ The wall which enclosed the trees was coast. Others, like the villas of Marius, the so-called "Sacellum," the earliest form Pompey, and Cæsar at Baiæ, were built of temple, open at the top to let in air and on the rocks, towering high above the light. Sometimes there was an altar near dangerous allurements for which that them, with lamps burning and the image lovely spot, the favorite resort of the of the serpent, the guardian god of the gay Roman world, was notorious. These place (genius loci), which is so often seen in were more like fortresses than villas, says the Pompeian houses and streets. Among Seneca, who thought it a reproach to have the objects hung from the trees are the a villa at Baiæ, and who fled from its sacred vittæ, or sashes, and the oscilla, dangers the day after his arrival. little votive images to Bacchus, connected ancients had a great love for the sea, but with the introduction of his worship into in their sea pieces they never painted Attica. Icarus -so runs the myth had a stormy sea. They were most familiar first cultivated the vine there, and the people having become drunk, thought he had poisoned them, and killed him. His daughter Erigone hanged herself in despair over his grave. Dionysus, to punish them, sent a drought over the land, and an irresistible desire among the women to hang themselves as an expiation. This ceased when the murderers of Icarus were punished; but the symbol of swinging in the air as an expiation survived in the festival of the Aiora, and in the suspended images. The oscilla may be seen in the museum at Naples in the form of a medallion and crescent-shaped marble slabs, with bas-reliefs sculptured on both sides. These were at one time believed to be disks, but the fact that they are intended to be hung up, and also that similar objects have been found represented hanging on trees and buildings, has shown that they are oscilla. Originally intended for sacred purposes, they may have been also used at Pompeii as ornaments, having been found principally in peristylia and viridaria. Tree-worship

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with its softer aspects, and the wild beauties of nature, which exercise such a spell over the modern mind, inspired them only with awe and terror. It is more difficult to trace the origin of the landscapes than that of the other compositions, as they have a much more mixed character, partly Greek, partly Roman. Landscape-painting had probably its origin in scenic decoration, and it developed in Greece during the period of the Diadochi, when the feeling for nature assumed a more definite form. This tendency is reflected in the poetry of the time, and was probably due to the conquests of Alexander, by which the Greeks acquired a wider knowl edge of the world and of nature. landscapes, with dramatic, mythological scenes, the idyllic ones which correspond with descriptions in Greek poetry, the Egyptian landscapes and the naval battles, have no doubt all a Hellenistic origin. On the other hand, the seacoasts with villas, and the representations of gardens, bear the Roman character, and are of a later date. Pliny mentions that the painter Ludius, in the time of Augustus, introduced new motives into landscape-painting, and he describes the very subjects

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we see represented in those pictures. In landscape-painting the painter had more free play than in figure-painting. The landscapes, with one or two exceptions, do not repeat themselves. The decorator worked without model, according to certain given precepts, and sometimes a more or less incongruous motive is put in simply to fill up the space. In the mythological landscapes which can be traced to Hellenistic models, we find the scenery of the background in complete harmony with the action represented. Much injus tice has been done to the Pompeian landscapes by comparing their perspective to that of the Chinese. It is true that of the two kinds of perspective, the linear and the aërial, the Pompeian artists best understood the latter, which is more a question of artistic feeling than of geometrical rule. They must, however, have had a sense of the linear perspective, since they carried it out within certain limits in their architectural drawings. In the front views it is usually correct, while it fails in the more complicated side views.

The question how far the Greeks un derstood the rules of perspective has been much debated. Materials are wanting to enable us to arrive at a positive conclusion. Though the perspective of some of the paintings that have come down to us is admirable as a whole, yet it has been maintained on good authority that not one of them, either at Pompeii or in other Roman ruins, could bear the test of the ruler and the compass. As, however, no masterpieces of Greek painting have come down to us, and the paintings that now remain represent decorative art alone, it is clear that we have not sufficient data to form a correct judgment.

Nor do the ancient writings supply the deficiency. Attempts to produce in stage scenery the illusion of reality had, according to Vitruvius, been first made in the days of Eschylus by the painter Agatharchus, who left a treatise on the subject. According to Aristotle it was Sophocles who first introduced scene-painting, but these two statements have been reconciled by Müller and Brunn. Since Dr. Dörpfeld's demonstrations have revolutionized the old ideas about the Greek stage, and have shown that the action took place in the round orchestra or dancing-place, some critics have disputed the statement of Vitruvius, or at least doubted whether it refers to scene-painting; but it is not so easy to refute Aristotle, who uses the word " scenography," and, moreover, the round orchestra did not exclude scenery,

a background from which the actors could emerge; a king's palace, a temple, or the like," as Miss Harrison explains. These were temporary structures, which were probably partly contrived by painting. The studies of Agatharchus were continued, says Vitruvius, by Democritus and Anaxagoras, who wrote "to explain how the points of sight and distance ought to guide the lines, as in nature, to a centre; so that by means of pictorial deception the real appearances of buildings appear on the scene, which, painted on a flat vertical surface, seem nevertheless to ad-. vance and recede." The panel-painters adapted the studies of the scenograph to the backgrounds of their paintings, and though scenography was an inferior kind of art which ministered chiefly to the taste of the multitude, it had no doubt an important influence on the development of painting, and Agatharchus prepared the way for Apollodorus, who first painted chiaroscuro. Pliny states that the painters of Sicyon made mathematical and geometrical studies essential conditions of good painting. Pamphilus influenced no doubt by the canon of Polycletus, a native of Sicyon, like himself-first laid down rules for painting as Polycletus had done for sculpture, and the painter Pausias, his disciple, put these rules into practice and excelled in foreshortening.

It is highly probable that the Greeks, who formulated the rules of geometry and who made drawing an essential part of the education of their free-born children, studied carefully the laws of appearances and applied the rules of geometry to the representation of objects on a flat surface. But beyond allusions to the most elementary rules, such as those mentioned by Vitruvius, there is nothing in the ancient writings to show what their theory was. Goethe, in his criticisms on the Pompeian paintings reproduced by Zahn, says that gifted as the artists were and endowed with exquisite senses, especially that of the eye, they saw right in the main. "What a sharp and true observation could give they possessed. The abstract rule upon which we pride ourselves, and which does not always agree with our taste, was, like so many others that were afterwards discovered, wholly unknown." Phidias knew better than his critics that the statue of Athene would fulfil all its conditions when placed on a high column, and the horses of the Parthenon are correct in all their motions, though the zoopraxiscope had not been invented. Whatever knowledge the Greeks had of the rules of perspective

has been lost to us, and, like much else, had to be laboriously reconquered when Europe emerged out of the darkness of the Middle Ages.* Helbig points out that the great difference between ancient and O schöne Welt, du bist abscheulichmodern landscape-painting lies in the treatment of atmospheric effects. Cloud did not affect the Greeks. To them she scenery and mists, which give so great a was full of sympathy with man's fate. In charm to the French, Dutch, and English Bion, one of the poets of the Hellenistic schools, are almost wholly absent from. age, the mountains, the trees, the rivers the Campanian landscapes. One reason, bewail the fate of Adonis. In Moschus's no doubt, is that southern nature does not "Lament for Bion" the trees cast down produce the same variety of effects as the their fruit, the flowers fade for sorrow .sombre, damp climates. of the North; but over the death of Bion. In the picture of when due allowance is made for this differ- the death of Hippolytus, described by ence in the aspect of nature herself, there Philostratus, the mountain nymphs tear still remain the different ways of looking their cheeks, the water nymphs their hair, at her. The Greek genius was eminently the flowers fade in the meadows, in symplastic, and though this retarded the prog-pathy with the fate of Hippolytus. In ress of painting, which did not reach its many of the Pompeian paintings a figure zenith till long after sculpture, it did not on a mountain-top, personifying the mounprove detrimental to the final development tain, looks down with interest on the scene of figure-painting, as it was combined below. But where man held such an allwith an exquisite sense of coloring. Their important place in nature, nature could not strong love of form rather prevented the be dissociated from man. She was ever artists from crowding their pictures; but the theatre, the witness of his actions, and it was less favorable to landscape-paint- the artists only represented her in relation ing, where color is more important than to him. It follows, from these various form. The landscape-painters never lost reasons, that in spite of the incontestable sight of the outlines which in nature so idyllic beauty and poetry of the Campaoften seem to melt away in the distant nian landscapes, they are restricted to a atmosphere. They uniformly selected a narrow scope, and it is doubtful whether high horizon to give more prominence to landscape-painting ever was more than a the topography of the scenery. And the subordinate branch of art in Greece. monochrome landscapes, painted either in green or yellow on some of the Pompeian walls, show the same tendency to attach greater importance to form than color.

moral sense. That serene indifference of nature to human suffering, which extorts from the modern poet the bitter. cry:

There is no evidence of any Greek painter having practised landscape-painting. The only Greek landscape-painters whose names have come down to us are Demetrius and Serapion, who were both from Alexandria and worked in Rome. Demetrius was the friend of king Ptolemy Philometer, who took up his abode with him when he came to Rome as an exile. Nothing is known of his paintings, and the name topographos, which Diodorus gives him, has led to much discussion as to the nature of his work. Serapion lived at a later date, and all we hear of him is that he painted scenery. Ludius, to whom Pliny gives a prominent place, seems to have applied landscapepainting only to decorative purposes. There are good reasons for believing that some of his work has come down to us in the paintings of a garden in Livia's villa at Prima Porta. They were painted in his time, in the style introduced by him. They are superior to any other garden per-representations, and they were found in an imperial villa, where the best artists were no doubt employed.

The anthropomorphic conception of nature, which was a stimulant to the development of sculpture, was also unfavorable to landscape-painting. While the Greeks peopled nature with gods and goddesses dryads, oreads, naiads, nymphs that inhabited the woods, the mountains, the streams the landscape itself was but a background; and though in Hellenistic times a stronger feeling for its beauties developed, it did not destroy this anthropomorphism, but grew up side by side with it, for the number of personifications of nature rather increased than diminished. We do not find among the Greeks a less deep and tender love of nature, or a less keen appreciation of her softer beauties than in modern times, but it was of a different kind. She was in some ways more to them than she is to us. In sonifying her, they attributed to her a

Pietro del Borgo, in the fifteenth century, was the first who elaborated the theory of modern perspective.

The Roman

The time when the Pompeian wall-dec

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orations were executed cannot be stated | aims at ornamenting the wall. Imitations with precision, but their chronology prob- of marble are given up. The candelabrum, ably ranges over the two centuries pre- which already appears in the second style, ceding the destruction. We find in them becomes a favorite and elegant motive. an almost complete illustration of the de- The mythological landscapes, of which the scription in Vitruvius of the successive finest examples that exist are the scenes stages of wall-painting. Though examples from the Odyssey found on the Esquiline of these various styles have been found in Rome, belong to this style, as well as in other Roman ruins, nowhere can we to the former one. Single figures, frefollow them up chronologically as well as quently of an Egyptian character, occur, at Pompeii. Mau and Overbeck distin- however, more often than imitations of guish between four styles. The earliest, panel paintings, which only became genin which there is no figure-painting, is eral in the later style of decoration. The characterized by imitations in painted colors are chaste, and little use is made stucco of colored marble panels, and its of minium. Beauty in simplicity, the duration corresponds with the period of true stamp of a refined and highly develpeace between the Hannibal and Social oped taste, is the special characteristic of wars, when Oscan culture, under Hellenic this style," says Mau. It probably exinfluences, reached its highest develop-tended over the early half of the first cenment, and the finest buildings in the town tury. The style that superseded it dif arose. This is generally known as the fered from it chiefly in being more highly tuff period- a name which Nissen has ornamental, more vivid in coloring, more given it, because the houses were mainly varied in design, and altogether more dazbuilt of volcanic tuff instead of the lime- zling to the eye. The two favorite colors stone from the Sarnus, which had pre- are yellow and sky-blue, especially the viously been used. Examples of the first former. Less use is made of minium, and style of decoration may be seen in the cheaper reds are used instead. The relaBasilica, the house of Sallust, and the tive merits of the pictures in the third house of the Faun; and traces in various and fourth style of decoration are difficult other houses show that it must have once to determine, as, through the earthquake, been very general. The colors are few many of the earlier ones were destroyed; and decided-violet, yellow, bluish green, and when the town was restored, probably and sometimes brick red, besides white only the best were preserved. A few also and black. In the house of the Faun it have been inserted into the wall. The was combined with magnificent mosaic pictures that are of Campanian origin befloors, executed at the same date. The long exclusively to the latest style, while chasteness of the walls and the richness those of the third style all go back to Helof the pavement form so tasteful an en-lenistic models. The tendency of the semble that their combination may well have belonged to the style, which probably originated in Alexandria, for marble panelling itself was not introduced into Italy till a later period.

The second style is no longer entirely ornamental. It consists of architectural designs which, by means of perspective, and light, and shades, are almost always intended to produce the delusion of an extension of space. Marble is still imitated, but in painting instead of panelled stucco. Painted masks and various other objects are introduced as ornaments, and finally, the architectural designs, by dividing the wall into compartments, become the framework of centre pictures. The lights and shades give more variety of coloring, and vermilion is used for the first time. This style probably dates from Sulla's colonization.

The third style differs from the second in being purely decorative. It uses the same means, but modifies them, and solely |

earlier period is, on the whole, more idealistic; that of the later one more realistic. The heroic and pathetic prevail in the third style, the sensuous in the fourth. The former excels in its draperies, the lines are carefully drawn; while in the latter the figures are more often nude and the coloring is more brilliant. Greater expression is given to the faces as the painter is brought into closer contact with reality. Some of the finest Pompeian paintings, such as the Homeric ones from the house of the tragic poet Zeus and Hera, and the carrying off of Briseis Achilles and Chiron, Achilles at Scyros, Zephyrus and Flora, Io and Isis, have been found in decorations of the latest style, as well as the majority of the aërial figures; and the exquisite Herculaneum painting, Telephus suckled by the hind, also belongs to this group.

The painted architectural constructions, which were originally true imitations and seemingly capable of giving real support

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