Page:History of Art in Primitive Greece - Mycenian Art Vol 2.djvu/454

 Pottery. 397 ducks, in the act of emerging from a groove seaming their centre. To make the relation between bird and foliage clear to all, each bird preserves the distinguishing feature of the leaf out of which it came. Thus the dark oblong mark that forms the centre of the leaf returns on the two ducks left of the top leaf. This elongated black lozenge is absent from the lower leaves, and no sombre markings appear about the birds perched on them. The middle duck, on the left, is larger than the others because older, and therefore more complete. None of the creatures have reached their full development ; this is shown by the articu- lated filaments on the back of the ducks, which in time will grow into wings. So, too, the fish are still imperfect and without scales. The vase admits of fewer personages than the amphora, but the import is the same. The painter, after a fashion of his own, has chalked out on clay a new chapter of Genesis, which Thales was subsequently to write. ^ We may be accused, perhaps, of having credited the Mycenian artist with conceptions far above his intellectual capacity ; but does it follow that because the men of that time had no books they were therefore devoid of ideas, and had not tried to unravel the problem of the origin of things, which, to a mind unconscious of the narrow limits of human knowledge, would seem an easy matter enough to solve ? By accepting M. Houssay s conjecture, certain details beheld on these two vases, especially that from Pitane, which would be hard to grasp on any other basis, arc satis- factorily explained. Why are birds placed in the depths of the sea ? Why is the butterfly opposed to the actinia ? Why is the porcupine there, unless it be for reasons which we think to have grasped ? The moment we place ourselves in that order of ideas, we comprehend, as we never did before the evident pleasure which the painter appears to have felt in the portrayal of marine animals. On the exterior of a tall, double-handled cup he depicted a cuttle-fish, or rather the slim-bodied calamar (Fig. 483). But he contented himself with expressing the two great feelers which distinguish the species, and suppressed the six smaller ones that surround the mouth. The decoration upon open shells, from which emerge tiny birds ; some fall on the earth and fly through the air, whilst others tumble into the sea and immediately begin to swim. It was extracted from a book printed in London as far back as 1597.
 * Max Miiller has published a figure representing a dead tree covered with half-