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DEVELOPMENT] nor yet arranged in formal rows one above the other, but distributed at different levels on the one plane of the picture, the levels being distinguished by summary indications of a landscape setting. Parts of some of the figures were hidden by risings of the ground. The general effect is probably represented by the paintings on the vase in the Louvre shown in fig. 4, one side of which exhibits the destruction of the children of Niobe, and the other the Argonauts. Simplicity in design and ethical dignity in the single forms are here unmistakable.



It is probable that Polygnotus had not fully mastered the difficulties of foreshortening with which the early “red-figure” masters were struggling, but later designs both on vases and elsewhere do show that in the 4th century at any rate these had been overcome. The drawing on the so-called Ficoronian Cista, and on the best of the Greek mirror-backs, may be instanced. The ancients recognized that in the latter part of the 5th century painting made a great technical advance, so that all that had gone before seemed archaic, while for the first time “the gates of art” were opened and the perfect masters entered in. The advance is in the direction of the representation not of form only but of space, and seems from literary notices to have implied a considerable acquaintance with perspective science. The locus classicus, one of great importance, is in Vitruvius. In the preface to his seventh book he writes of Agatharcus, a painter who flourished at Athens in the middle and third quarter of the 5th century, that he executed a scene-painting for Aeschylus, and wrote a treatise upon it which inspired the philosophers Democritus and Anaxagoras to take up the subject, and to show scientifically from the constitution of the eye and the direction of rays of light how it was possible in scenic paintings to give sure images of objects otherwise hard to fix correctly, so that when such objects were figured on an upright plane at right-angles to the line of sight some should appear to recede and others to come forwards. It would not be easy to summarize more aptly the functions of perspective, and if philosophers of the eminence of those just mentioned worked out these rules and placed them at the disposal of the artists, the transition from ancient to modern painting should have been accomplished in the 5th century ,

instead of just two thousand years afterwards! So far however as the existing evidence enables us to judge, this was not actually the case, and in spite of Agatharcus and the philosophers, painting pursued the even tenor of its way within the comparatively narrow limits set for it by the genius of ancient art (see ). It may be admitted that in many artistic qualities it was beyond praise. In beauty, in grace of line, in composition, we can imagine works of Apelles, of Zeuxis, of Protogenes, excelling even the efforts of the Italian painters, or only matched by the finest designs of a Raphael or a Leonardo. In the small encaustic pictures of a Pausias there may have been all the richness and force we admire in a Chardin or a Monticelli. We may even concede that the Greek artist tried at times to transcend the natural limits of his art, and to represent various planes of space in perspective, as in the landscape scenes from the Odyssey, or in figure compositions such as the “Alexander and Darius at Issus,” preserved to us in a mosaic, or the “Battle-piece” by Aristides that contained a hundred combatants. The facts, however, remain, first that the Greek pictures about which we chiefly read were of single figures, or subjects of a very limited and compact order with little variety of planes; and second, that the existing remains of ancient painting are so full of mistakes in perspective that the representation of distance cannot have been a matter to which the artists had really set themselves. The monumental evidence available on the last point is sufficient to override arguments to the contrary that may be built up on literary notices. No competent artist, or even teacher of drawing, who examines what is left of ancient painting, can fail to see that the problem of representing correctly the third dimension of space, though it may have been attacked, had certainly not been solved. It is of no avail to urge that these remains are not from the hands of the great artists but of mere decorators. In modern times the mere decorator, if he had passed through a school of art, would be as far above such childish blunders as a Royal Academician. We have only to consider dispassionately the photographic reproductions from ancient paintings (Herrmann, Denkmäler der Malereieds Altertums, Munich, 1906, &c.) to see that the perspective researches of the philosophers had not resulted in a general comprehension among the artists of the science of receding planes. For example, in the famous wall-painting of “Zeus and Hera on Mount Ida” in the House of the Tragic Poet at Pompeii, the feet of the standing figure of the goddess are nearer to the spectator than the seat of her lord, but the upper part of her form is away on the farther side of him (see fig. 5, Plate IV.). No one who could draw at all would be capable now of such a mistake. In interiors the perspective of the rafters of a roof, of a table, a stool, a throne, is in most cases faulty; and the scale of the figures seems often to be determined rather by their relative importance in the scene than by their position on the planes of the picture. In the Pompeian landscape-piece of “Paris on Mount Ida” (Herrmann, No. 8) there is no sense of the relative proportions of objects, and a cow in the foreground is much smaller than Paris, who is a long way back in the composition.

It is an additional confirmation of this view to find early Christian and early medieval painting confined to the representation of the few near objects, which the older Oriental artists had all along envisaged. If classical painters had really revolutionized design, as it was actually revolutionized in the 15th century of our era, and had followed out to their logical consequence the innovations of Agatharcus, we may be sure that the