Page:A History of Art in Ancient Egypt Vol 1.djvu/35

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

Gerhard led the way in 1831 with his famous report on the Volscian vases; numerous savants have followed his example, and nearly every day the series which they have established are enriched by new discoveries. These vases, as we now know, were made in many places, at Athens, at Corinth, in the Greek cities of Africa and of Magna Græcia. They were eagerly sought after by some of the races whom the Greeks considered barbarous, by the Græco-Scythians of the Crimea, as well as by