Page:History of Art in Primitive Greece - Mycenian Art Vol 2.djvu/368

 Glyptic Art. 315 women who draw the bow, for example, or hold goats by the horns, or are embracing swans (Figs. 419, 11, 12 ; 425, 2). The costume, the theme and action of all these effigies are but echoes of those we have already examined. Here, however, are two fictitious types as yet new to glyptic art. The first is a personage with an ass's head, and, it would appear, the claws and tail of a grasshopper (Fig. 421, 8) ; next comes a nondescript creature, a man's body with the head and long horns of an antelope (Fig. 425, 15). Both monsters carry heads of game, suspended from a pole. The former re-appears in a Mycenae fresco (Fig. 431); the second, though differently composed, belongs to the same order of ideas. They are daemons, who inhabit forests and mountains, in whom we divine the ancestors of the satyrs of classic poetry. A gold-leaf gives us the hippocampus (Fig. 425, 13; 412). Whether the intaglios we have cited one by one up to the present time have a civil state or not, we think they are all instances of an art whose palmy days were in those centuries which witnessed the rise of the Tirynthian and Mycenian edifices. The next in order of succession are some specimens chosen from the prodigious quantities that reach us from the Archipelago (Figs. 419, I, 2, 3, 4 ; 425, 5, 14, 16). Four at least of these in- taglios have a far more archaic appearance than the most care- lessly executed gems ever brought out of the Argolic or Laconian graves. Could aught be more barbarous than the image where we rather divine than discern a man with outstretched arms, grasping a sceptre in each hand ; or the pair of winged animals, a bull and a horse, or Heracles struggling against Nereus, Ocean's old sire ? The work consists of parallel or cross hatchings, in which we feel the jerkings and shakings of a plodding and clumsy hand ; their technique in no way resembles that of our gems, where the exposed parts are always smooth ; where, too, inner cuttings are juxtaposed by the engraver for the sake of bringing out certain details, the folds of drapery, wisps of hair, and the like. The bird perched on the back of an ox, the lion lying down in front of a tree, are certainly a step in advance, but the manner is none the less cold and dry ; there is a total absence of that sincere spontaneity which we find so attractive in genuine Mycenian intaglios. Accordingly, it would be wrong to imagine that the gems of this worse-than-bad style can take us back to the begin-