Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 17.djvu/51

Rh yellow. 1 Judging from the peculiar way in which the Greeks and their imitators the Romans used the names of colours, it appears that they paid more attention to tones and relations of colour than to actual hues. Thus most Greek and Latin colour-names are now quite untranslatable. Homer s &quot;wine-like sea&quot; (envoi/-), Sophocles s &quot;wine- coloured ivy&quot; ((Ed. Col.), and Horace s &quot;purpureus olor&quot; probably refer less to what we should call colour than to the chromatic strength of the various objects and their more or less strong powers of reflecting light, either in motion or when at rest. Nor have we any word like Virgil s &quot;flavus,&quot; which could be applied both to a lady s hair and to the leaf of an olive-tree. 2 During the best periods of Greek art the favourite classes of subjects were scenes from poetry, especially Homer, and contemporary history. The names Trii aKoO-iJK^ and a-Toa TTOLKI^ were given to many public buildings from their walls being covered with paintings. Additional interest was given to the historical subjects by the intro duction of portraits ; e.g., in the great picture of the battle of Marathon (490 B.C.), on the walls of the crroa iroiKiX-q in Athens, portraits were given of the Greek generals Miltiades, Callimachus, and others. This picture was painted about forty years after the battle by Polygnotus and Micon. One of the earliest pictures recorded by Pliny (xxxv. 8) represented a battle of the Magnesians (c. 716 B.C.); it was painted by Bularchus, a Lydian artist, and bought at a high price by King Candaules. Many other important Greek historical paintings are men tioned by Pausanias and earlier writers. The Pompeian mosaic of the defeat of the Persians by Alexander is probably a Romanized copy from some celebrated Greek painting ; it obviously was not designed for mosaic work. Landscape painting appears to have been unknown among the Greeks, even as a background to figure subjects. The poems especially of Homer and Sophocles show that this was not through want of appreciation of the beauties of nature, but partly, probably, because the main object of Greek painting was to tell some definite story, and also from their just sense of artistic fitness, which prevented them from attempting in their mural decorations to dis guise the flat solidity of the walls by necessarily delusive effects of aerial perspective and distance. It is interesting to note that even in the time of Alex ander the Great the somewhat archaic works of the earlier painters were still highly appreciated. In particular Aris totle gives high praise to Polygnotus, both for his power of combining truth with idealization in his portraits and for his skill in depicting men s mental characteristics ; on this account he calls him 6 -I /Ooypaffros. Lucian too is no less enthusiastic, and praises Polygnotus alike for his grace, drawing, and colouring. Later painters, such as Zeuxis and Apelles, appear to have produced easel pictures more than mural paintings, and these, being easy to move, were mostly carried off to Rome by the early emperors. Hence Pausanias, who visited Greece in the time of Hadrian, mentions but few works of the later artists. Owing to the lack of existing specimens of Greek painting it would be idle to attempt an account of their technical methods, but no doubt those employed by the Romans described below were derived with the rest of their art from the Greeks. Speaking of their stucco, Pliny refers its superiority over that made by the Romans to the fact 1 Pliny s remarks on subjects such as this should be received with caution. He was neither a scientific archaeologist nor a practical artist. 2 So also a meaning unlike ours is attached to Greek technical words by rbvos they meant, not &quot;tone,&quot; but the gradations of light and shade, and by ap/jLoyri the relations of colour. See Pliny, //. N., xxxv. 5 ; and Rusk in, Mod. Painters, pt. iv. cap. 13. 41 that it was always made of lime at least three years old, and that it was well mixed and pounded in a mortar before being laid on the wall ; he is here speaking of the thick stucco in many coats, not of the thin skin mentioned above as being laid on marble. Greek mural painting, like their sculpture, was chiefly used to decorate temples and public buildings, and com paratively rarely either for tombs 3 or private buildings, at least in the days of their early republican simplicity. They were in the true sense of the word works of monu mental art, and were no doubt designed and executed with that strict self-restraint and due subordination to their architectural surroundings which we see so strongly marked in all Greek sculpture of the best periods. 4 Roman Painting. A very large number of Roman mural paintings now exist, of which by far the greatest quantity was discovered in the private houses and baths of Pompeii, nearly all dating between 63 A.D., when the city was ruined by an earthquake, and 79 A.D., when it was buried by Vesuvius. A catalogue of these and simi lar paintings from Herculaneum and Stabiae, compiled by Professor Helbig, comprises 1966 specimens. The ex cavations in the baths of Titus and other ancient build ings in Rome, made in the early part of the 16th century, excited the keenest interest and admiration among the painters of that time, and very largely influenced the later art of the Renaissance. These paintings, especially the &quot; grotesques &quot; or fanciful patterns of scroll-work and pilasters mixed with semi-realistic foliage and figures of boys, animals, and birds, designed with great freedom of touch and inventive power, seem to have thoroughly fasci nated Raphael during his later period, and many of his pupils and contemporaries. The &quot;loggie&quot; of the Vatican and of the Farnesina palace are full of carefully-studied 1 6th-century reproductions of these highly-decorative paint ings. Of late years the excavations on the Palatine and in the garden of the Farnesina in Rome have brought to light some mural paintings of the 1st century of our era, perhaps superior in execution even to the best of the Pompeian series. The range of subjects found in Roman mural paintings is very large mythology, religious ceremonies, genre, still life, and even landscape (the latter generally on a small scale, and treated in an artificial and purely decora tive way), and lastly history. Pliny mentions several large and important historical paintings, such as those with which Valerius Maximus Messala decorated the walls of the Curia Hostilia, to commemorate his own victory over Hiero II. and the Carthaginians in Sicily in the 3d century B.C. The earliest Roman painting recorded by Pliny was by Fabius, surnamed Pictor, on the walls of 3 One instance only of a tomb-painting is mentioned by Pausanias (vii. 22). Some fine specimens have recently been discovered in the Crimea, but not of a very early date ; see Stephaui, Collate rendu, &c., St Petersburg, 1878, &c. 4 Some of the following works contain accounts of the painting of the Romans as well as of the Greeks : Letronne, La Peint. histor. murale (1835); Hittorf, L Arch, polychrome chez les Grecs (1851) ; Wornum, Hist, of Painting (1847) ; Newton, Lect. on the Painting of the Ancients, deliv. at Univ. Coll. Lon. (1882) ; Hermann, Die 1 oly- gnotischen Gemalde ; Lenormant, Les Peintures de Polygnote (1864) ; Winckelmann, Storia dell Arti (1784) ; Miiller, Handbuch d. Arcliwl. der Kunst, &c. (1830) ; Pliny, H. X., Books xxxv., xxxvi.; Pausanias, x. 25-31, description of paintings in the Lesche at Delphi, and various other passages throughout his work ; Artaucl de Montor, Kunsller (1853-56) ; Durand, Hist, de la Peinture Andenne (1725) ; Meyer, Gesch. der Mdenden Kilnstc (1824) ; Raoul Rochette, La Peinture des Grecs (1840), and Man. d Antiq. (1833) ; Poynter, Deco rative Art, series of lectures published by the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings (1882). XVII. 6