Page:Philological Museum v2.djvu/321

311 On the Painting of an aricient Vase. 311 and short verses, so arranged as to exhibit a cippus with architectural features of a very modern style, no less foreign to the noble simplicity of ancient times in its figure, than the idea and character of the poem itself. The altar in the painting is consecrated to a goddess, who is set up near it on a fluted Doric pillar. Statues, vessels, and groupes, are not uncommonly represented in ancient mo- numents placed on single isolated pillars. The purpose of elevating an object of veneration, so that it may be visible from every side, seems most conveniently attained by its position on a pillar. Such pillars grew from the lov/ Doric to the height of the columns of Trajan and M. Aurelius. The image of the goddess, like the altar, bears the stamp of high antiquity : even in the picture it seems to disclose the material of which it was formed, and presents the appear- ance of a venerable ^oavov^ in the proper sense of the word : a figure carved in wood. The arms, with open palms, are outstretched as in the act of benediction or prayer, as in the images of the Ephesian Diana : unless the symbolical interpretation was annexed in later times to this attitude, whereas in fact the helplessness of art in its earliest stage could devise no other way of separating the arms from the vertical body in the rude human figure, than by a transverse beam^ On the head of the goddess is a radiated crown : she is clad in an embroidered tunic, closely fitted to the body, with sleeves, girt with a broad zone above the loins : beside these she has no distinguishing attribute. But the name affixed in the picture designates her as XPY2H. The artist followed the legend, according to which it was the tutelary goddess of the isle of Chryse to whom the altar was dedicated on which Hercules sacrificed, which Phi- loctetes discovered, and where Chryse herself punished his neglect of her love, by the bite of a serpent which issued from her altar. The island itself, which bore the same name with the ^ So the celebrated ^oKava at Sparta, the ancient hnages of the Dioscuri, were a rude representation of two brothers clasping each other in their arms. The vertical beams represented the bodies, the two transverse beams the arms : only we must not conceive that one of these was above and the other below, but that both were carried through the upper part of the bodies, at a small distance from each other. Vol. II. No. 5. R r