Page:History of Art in Primitive Greece - Mycenian Art Vol 2.djvu/377

 324 Primitive Greece: Mycenian Art. so wonderful in the fact that hunting should have been a theme on which the imagination of Mycenian artists loved to exercise itself? Did not tradition count among the great and good deeds of Theseus, his having rid the inhabitants of Attica of the Marathon bull ? Some have expressed surprise that palms should be figured on one of the vases in question, in that the tree does not grow naturally in Greece. We do not suppose that the champaigns of Argos and Sparta produced edible dates at that period, any more than they now do; but why should not the palm have been cultivated as a purely ornamental plant by princes who, like Alcinous, loved to surround themselves with beautiful gardens? Besides, they had not to go far to admire its elegant outline and flexible plume of feathers swayed by the passing breeze. We know that it grew at Delos when the hymn to Apollo was composed ; whilst the palm-wood, which to-day is one of the pleasing features of the Sittia district, in Crete, was doubtless even then in existence. Finally, remembering that the Achaeans were a nation of soldiers and adventurous mariners, whose raids often extended to the coasts of the eastern basin of the Mediterranean, where is the impossibility of their bands having landed more than once under the palms of the Delta and those of Southern Syria ? Hence is explained why the palm is intro- duced not only as an accessory into the decorative scheme of the Vaphio goblet, but as chief ornament on the handles of mirrors (Figs. 379-381), and in the field of more than one intaglio (Figs. 419, 6, 10, 18; 421, II ; 424, 11). Nothing characterizes an art better than the conventions which it employs ; that is to say, as soon as these cease to be of the kind which arise from the inexperience of the artist, and are necessarily inherent to every nascent art One such convention is peculiar to Mycenian art ; we allude to the very singular ex- pedient which it uses to express the ground. This, in the monuments of Oriental culture, is figured under the feet of the personages ; above their heads are flights of birds intended to suggest the notion of heaven, of infinite space. At Mycenae, however, there is no sky; and but for the figures, which must inevitably be placed in the vertical plane, the head towards the upper rim of the vase, we should have no up or down in the picture. The rocks, which are meant to indicate the broken