Page:History of Art in Primitive Greece - Mycenian Art Vol 2.djvu/387

 334 Primitive Greece: Mycenian Art. is not at all unlikely that an Oriental intaglio suggested the idea of the general arrangement, as well as of this or that minor detail ; but the gem, nevertheless, was engraved by a native artist, who put features there which he had not found in his model, granted that there was a model. Such would be the small personage with a spherical shield curved in at the sides, who hovers in mid-air ; or the women's skirt, which, on the cylinders, never assumes the crescent-like shape above the ankle beheld on the figures of the Mycenae gems. If the engraver derived his inspiration from a foreign subject, he translated it into his own idiom. The conclusion, no matter the side we approach the subject, is invariably the same. Mycenian sculpture, like architecture, is an autonomous and original art ; it may have demanded of older civilizations the primeval idea of certain forms and the secret of certain processes, but it has already many affinities with the art of historic Greece, and is allied thereto by closer ties than to any branch of Oriental art. The sequence and successive phases through which this primitive art passed during its evolution, from the shapeless simulacra picked up in the lower strata at Troy to the elegant and complicated works executed on the eve of the Dorian invasion, remain obscure. All we can hope to do is to fix some leading marks which will enable us to roughly estimate the duration of that long evolution, and divide it into a certain number of periods, according to the distinctive characteristics of each. Of the first and second settlement at Troy, it can scarcely be said that sculpture, even in its embryo state, existed there, for the essayals of a hand trying to imitate types of the organic world are exceedingly rare. The tribes of the Cyclades, whose existence is marked by the oldest cemeteries that have been found in some of the islands, stole a march on those of the Troad. If the rendering of the living form, as we find it in their marble idols, leaves much to be desired, the essential elements are all there, a first success due, perhaps, to the ease with which marble can be worked. We know from more than one example how far the progress of art and industry among various peoples has been influenced by the employment of a fresh material. Out of a rock, docile to the tool, the inhabitants fashioned vases for domestic and orna- mental uses, along with effigies of their gods, who perhaps even then bore some of the names which now cannot be spoken