Page:Repository of Arts, Series 1, Volume 01, 1809, January-June.djvu/97

Rh circumstances, will be impelled to similar pursuits. If in the new world (whose parts are remote from each other, separated by dangerous seas, and without means of intercourse with each other, or with the continents of Europe or Asia), carved and engraved canoes and war implements, were found at the Friendly and Society Islands, picture-writing at Mexico, and sculptured idols both at New Zealand and the Sandwich Islands, there is little reason to doubt the double invention of plastic art in the world of antiquity; and the poetical and interesting story which Pliny and Athenagoras agree in telling of the Corinthian maid, the daughter of Dibutades, may be believed, even though it should appear from history and indisputable facts, that modelling and engnraving, and perhaps sculpture in relievo, were practised in the more eastern countries for ages before, and while the Greeks were yet in a state of barbarism.

Even the scriptural accounts of imitative art, though of very remote antiquity, do not carry us back to the origin of either modelling, engraving, sculpture, embroidery, or painting. That the latter art is of subsequent invention to the former, appears highly probable both from the testimony and the silence of Moses and of Homer. The decalogue, which forbad the Hebrews to worship graven images, says nothing of the far more fascinating art (to the senses of the multitude) of painting—so much more likely had it existed, to have seduced them from the worship of the true, but unseen God; and in the term idolatry, so often repeated in holy writ, as well as the reproach of Laban, we trace the existence, though not the invention of the of the : while, from the 18th chapter of Genesis, we learn that signets (or engraved seal-rings) were so common, as to be worn by the sons of Jacob, even before they were driven by famine into the land of Egypt: where again, as we learn from the 41st chapter of the the same book: "Pharaoh took his ring from off his hand, and put it on the hand of Joseph." When Laban pursues, and overtakes Jacob, he reproachfully says to him, "Wherefore hast thou stolen away my gods?—Now Rachel had taken the images and put them in the camel's furniture."

From this passage it appears, that the worship of the teraphim, lares, penates, or household gods of antiquity, as well as the knowledge and practice of modelling, may be traced up to an æra which preceded the birth of Moses by several ages. Cedrenus further asserts, that Abraham burnt the idols of Terah his father; and that Serug, the progenitor of Abraham, and the sixth in descent from Shem (the son of Noah), as well as Terah, was a modeller of images.

It is therefore probable that same plastic material of which the Babylonian bricks were moulded, and with which, according to the Pentateuch, Babel was built, first invited the hand, and called forth the ingenuity of the modeller; if we might safety rely on the authority of Cedrenus for the fact, that the Assyrian ancestors of Abraham were fabricators of idols, we might listen with less surprise to the occasional backslidings and