Page:History of Art in Primitive Greece - Mycenian Art Vol 2.djvu/369

 3i6 Primitive Greece: Mycenian Art. nings of glyptic art. What the most shapeless of these stones shadow forth is the profound decadence which descended upon this art after the fall of the Achcean royalties, when it was thrown back and kept at a standstill a hundred or two hundred years. Those intaglios which exhibit better drawing are no test of efforts made by an incipient art towards progress, but rather of a fresh start, a re-awakening to life and activity under the in- fluence of Oriental models. Thus, the winged and bearded bull . is reminiscent of Chaldsean and Assyrian palaces. As to subjects such as the fight between Heracles and Nereus, or Prometheus bound to a rock, we have found no trace of them in the Vaphio and Mycenae glyptics. Wherever we find intaglios that may be explained away by these and the similar myths transmitted to us by Greek letters, the chances are about even that we are in presence of gems dating no farther back than the ninth or eighth century b.c.^ The rude manipulation of some of these gems has caused them to be considered unduly old ; the same error has been committed in regard to intaglios of a much later date for a reason exactly the reverse of this. If these have been confused with genuine Mycenian gems, it is because the themes beheld on them are very simple, and of the kind which archaic art so much affected, namely, the portrayal of one or other of those animals whose image so often appears in the works of our engravers. In such cases it is extremely difficult to difTerentiate between the really old and the comparatively modern pieces. The difference seems to me to be this. If the artists of the sixth and fifth centuries B.C. do not surpass their far-ofT predecessors in their imitations of Nature, and scarcely infuse more animation and intelligent fidelity into them, they yet have better tools, and there- fore a lighter hand ; the engravings have all the air of having come more easily to them. I should incline, though falteringly, to assign this recent date to a pair of gems preserved in the ^ The wrong attribution referred to above will be found in Milchofer's otherwise suggestive and instructive study, entitled Ittsehteine. He was the first to approach a subject fraught with difficulties, and wTote his book some time before the dis- coveries made at Mycenae and Vaphio. Diimmler, on the other hand, already attri- butes the date we have adopted for the island-stonfes to those of Melos, which he published in the Athenische Mifiheihmgen. Among the intaglios which Rossbach has printed in the Zeifung and Avnali respectively, the number of pieces of certain Mycenian origin appears to us exceedingly small.