Page:History of Art in Primitive Greece - Mycenian Art Vol 1.djvu/375

 348 Primitive Greece: Mycenian Art. Greek in blood, as well as of those districts over which have swept the Slav, the Albanian, and the Turkoman in turn, destroying villages and towns, but which have emerged out of their ruins after a shorter or longer break in their social life and culture. These designations do not go beyond the begin- ning of the Renaissance, when a love for classic lore was rekindled, and inquisitive minds revisited Greece, using Pausanias as their guide ; the names were taken up by the sharp-witted natives and ciceroni with an eye to business, and in this way they assumed a seemingly traditional air, enough to pass muster. Such denominations were all the more deceptive that they are often puerile ; the name of Lantern of Demosthenes* applied to the Choragic monument of Lysicrates at Athens, for example. Verily, small was the equipment of scholars who could endorse such inanities. The so-called ** Treasury of Atreus," with slight differences, reproduces a type which we have met before on the slope of Sipylus, in Phrygia, as well as in the Carian peninsula of Halicarnassus;^ but in Hellas proper will be found the best exemplar of this class of monuments. A full description of it will come by and by. For the present it will be enough to recall the main features of this and other very similar edifices, both at Mycenae, in the Peloponnesus, and Central Greece. The masonry of the treasury in question, unlike the tumulus of Asia Minor, which is invariably built of rubble and mud standing in the open, consists of large blocks, and is embedded on one side in the flank of the hill. The building is made up of a long entrance passage {dromos) and a circular chamber {ikolos), over which rises a dome, parabolic in shape. To us brought up in the traditions of Roman architecture, the idea of a cupola is intimately bound up with that of a vault, and unless previously prepared, one who enters the spacious nave looks out for voussoirs, and notices their absence with real feelings of surprise and dis- appointment. So great is his astonishment, that he deems himself the object of hallucination, and unconsciously turns to the spot where he hopes to find the springers and the key-stone, but all in vain.^ The roof which in limine gives that illusive im- ^ History of Art ^ Nowhere, perhaps, does Pausanias show more clearly than in relation to these walls, that, though a good clerk, he had no eye for brick and stonework. How else