Page:History of Art in Primitive Greece - Mycenian Art Vol 2.djvu/270

 Representations of Human Life. 223 may be said to have made discoveries in the strict sense of the word, if not in the depths of the soil, in the confused mass of every kind which Schliemann, with characteristic impetuosity, had hastened all too soon to publish without having them first carefully examined.^ The material of the daggers is bronze. As a rule, the show pieces are decorated by laminae of a more precious metal or various alloys, inserted in the blade, one for. each side. The decorative scheme is not uniform ; the simplest is that of three bronze blades, measuring from forty to eighty centimetres in length (Nos. 4-6, Koumanoudis). Running animals are figured on both faces ; we see horses on one specimen (Fig. 360), and grifiins on two others (Fig. 361). Daggers composed of three pieces, i.e. the blade strictly so called, and plates applied to each face, average twenty to twenty-five centimetres in length. This more delicate process was only employed for the shorter weapons, but it slightly differed from one piece to another. The simplest specimen, solely ornamented with spirals and rosettes, and engraved in gold-leaf, appears in PI. XVII. 2? Swords ^ M. Koumanoudis announced the result of his operation in a note to the accompanied by a plate containing the image of five blades. There still remained one of the weapons to be cleaned. When the difficult job was accomplished, it was published, with a much better plate than that of the 'AOyfi^cuor, in the At/ienisc/ie Mittheilungen by Ulrich Kohler. M. Foucard, then Director of the French School at Athens, was not slow in grasping the immense value of the daggers, but not being satisfied with the colourless images that had api>eared in the publications referred to above, and aware of the help which colour— far better than the most detailed verbal descriptions — would furnish to correctly understand the character and processes employed in the execution of the blades in question, he com- missioned M. Blavette, a student architect at the French Academy in Rome, then on a mission at Athens, to copy them, which he did with five water-colour drawings that are exact fac-similes of the originals. These drawings were then engraved on stone by M. Dambourgez, under M. Blavette's supervision. The actual size of these weapons will be indicated with each successive figure, accompanied by a section to indicate the thickness of the blade, and the salience of the nails which served to fix the hilt. M. Blavette's plates were published in the Bulletin de correspondance hellinique, for which I wrote an article. I have scarcely anything to add to what I then said, but have availed myself of what has been published on the subject since then by MM. Schuchardt, Tsoundas, and H. Brunn. M. Foucard allowed me to keep the blocks, in view of the History of Arty and we are indebted to his kindness for being able to offer to our readers representations of works than which none are so difficult to reproduce as these. The editor and the authors of the present volume beg that he will accept their sincere thanks.
 * h%rvaiov^ 1880. This was followed by a description of eight of the daggers,
 * Length, 235 centimetres.