Page:History of Art in Primitive Greece - Mycenian Art Vol 2.djvu/407

 354 Primitive Gueece: Mycenian Art. vary. The working out of these involves the least possible variety ; so that the ornamentist falls into unending repetitions, which the slight changes introduced from one piece to another, bearing solely on detail and arrangement, do little to improve. It would be sheer loss of time to stop on the way in order to point out the varieties on any one design. We will confine ourselves to defining the principle of this decoration, showing, by a few well-chosen examples, how it was applied to the different materials which this industry employed to satisfy the demands of societies that, as they became richer and more settled in their habits, called forth greater proficiency and ingeniousness on the part of the craftsman. The pottery of the primitive period is represented, in the museums of Europe, by thousands of vases and countless frag- ments. This earthenware, which until lately was passed over by archaeologists with scarcely a word of mention, has now been submitted to minute study, and the most interesting types have been reproduced in works specially devoted to this branch of in- quiry. Thus, Schliemann in his IlioSy published hundreds of vases which he had dug up at Troy; whilst in the plates of MM. Fouqu6 and A. Dumont will be found nearly all the pieces that have come from Thera.* Again, the collections of MM. Furt- wangler and Loeschke represent the works one by one of a more advanced stage of industry, which have been discovered up to 1886. These several publications supply us with a real treasury of Mycenian ceramics, in the sense formerly attached to the word.^ This is not the place to enter into any detailed account of the subject ; antiquities of this class have been exhumed in such prodigious quantities since the publication of the Mykenische Vasen, that, were they printed, they would swell out that learned catalogue to double its present size. Accordingly, we shall content ourselves with pointing out the march followed by the art of the potter in its development around the ^gean, placing before the reader some typical specimens, in order that he may judge of the forms which it created and the successive modes of decoration which it adopted, between the distant age when the dweller of 1 A. Dumont and J. Chaplain, Lcs ceramiques ie la Greu propre. 2 A. FuRTWANGLER and J. Loeschke, Mykenische Thongefasse, Mykenische Vasen.