Page:History of Art in Primitive Greece - Mycenian Art Vol 2.djvu/406

 Pottery. 353 of the painter and sculptor multiplies without pause works in which the interpretation of the living, especially the human form, is manifestly original, the artisan never fails to imitate the artist. He adapts and reproduces the interpretation and types of the latter in his most carefully wrought pieces. We find, therefore, everywhere a reduced image, the small change, so to speak, of the creations of the nobler art ; be it in the furniture, pottery, or ornament. It even frequently happens that objects of current fabrication are almost the only information which help us to judge of this or that national tendency. This, owing to the chances of the excavations, is now scantily represented in the monuments of the higher plastic art. Thus it comes to pass that mutilated or nearly lost series can be completed or restored from ornaments which the tool of a craftsman distributed on the handle of a spoon and the hilt of a weapon, or from the decoration which his brush has laid on the walls of a light bowl of clay. The case is different here, where the treatment of the noblest organic types did not assume much importance until the end of the period about which we are busy. Just at the moment when the effect of that progress would have re-acted on industry in all its fullness, invasion and conquest scattered the artisans upon whom this influence would have been exercised to the four winds of heaven. On the other hand, the crafts could not benefit from art in those centuries during which the tribes that occupied the western coasts of Asia Minor and the isles of the ^gean carried on their obscure existence and activity, for the simple reason that art was as yet unrevealed. Hence when the artisan, in obedience to the instinct which awakes in man even before he has emerged from barbarism, strove to adorn his handiwork, all he could do by way of orna- mentation was to form patterns based on a combination of lines, or, following the example of Nature, to imitate very simple organic forms. The number of such combinations is very small, for the lower forms of the physical world lend themselves to but few movements. The result of this is, that for the greatest part of the initial age of which we are endeavouring to present a general view, the decoration on industrial productions has an appear- ance of richness which is all on the surface. Even where it shows itself most ambitious, it can easily be reduced, through analysis, to an exceedingly small number of elements that never VOL. II. A A