Page:History of Art in Primitive Greece - Mycenian Art Vol 2.djvu/343

 290 Primitive Greece: Mycenian Art. of pebbles selected for their colour, shape, and polish from among those which the sea or the mountain torrents rolled on to the beach, may have had something to do in the adoption of these shapes. Some of these pebbles are round, others oviform, but all were perforated and mixed with the prettiest and gayest shells on the shore, to form rustic necklaces. Next came artificial pebbles, or terra-cotta fusaioles. Among the many uses demanded of fusaioles by the tribes that fashioned them by thousands, ornament was certainly one of them. Then, too, they seem to have thought, in very early days, of adding to the value and decorative effect of the stones, real and artificial, %y tracing upon them more or less rudimentary designs with the point. But when society advanced, and the use of s^^ became general, they ceased to be content with mere rud^Katchings on the stone ; and felt their way to cutting and modelling the image in its depth. Nevertheless, the ovoid and lentoid forms were too much engrained in the habits of the people to be easily set aside ; all the more that the latter lends itself easily and without effort to adorn the bezel of a ring. We will begin our description with those pieces which, owing to the place where they were found and the circumstances attend- ing their discovery, may be placed with the utmost certainty in the early part of the archaic period. It is self-evident, there- fore, that the first place must be given to intaglios chiselled in solid metal. Of these the most interesting specimens were yielded by the excavations which Schliemann carried on at Mycenai. If the marble and clay idols take us back to the beginnings of sculpture in the round and relief, it is not the same with the engraving process. The first notion of this art must be sought in the ornaments incised on the Trojan cylinders and fusaioles (Figs. 55, 56). But the distance which separates these shapeless designs, hastily traced in the moist clay, from forms graven in hard substances, is a wide one. Intaglios were non-existent at Troy and Thera ; and none have been discovered in the pre- historic necropoles of Oliaros, Amorgos, and Melos by MM. Dummler and Bent. Perhaps the habit of using seals may have arisen in the Achaean kingdoms of Peloponnesus, whence it spread all over the ^Egean. The art, at Mycenai, had already made considerable advance when the shaft-graves were raised.