Page:A History of Art in Ancient Egypt Vol 1.djvu/77

 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 Assyrian 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 assign 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