Page:The American Cyclopædia (1879) Volume XII.djvu/808

 794 PAINTING doubtless owing to this dependence upon estab- lished canons that the artists were enabled to impart to their works that character of stability and unity of purpose which so impresses the modern traveller on the banks of the Nile. Their technical merits are slight. The imita- tion of nature was never carried beyond an outlined diagram arbitrarily colored ; of ideal beauty they are utterly destitute ; and perspec- tive, chiaroscuro, and the science of composi- tion seem to have been unknown. Men and women were generally painted red, animals brown, birds blue and yellow, and other ob- jects according to similar arbitrary rules, in utter disregard of their natural appearance. Sometimes a varnish of glue or resin was ap- plied to the finished picture, which may account for the freshness which the colors still retain. The most flourishing period of Egyptian art was that from about 1400 B. 0. to the Persian conquest in 525, after which a slow but grad- ual decline is observable, until in the early part of the Christian era the art of the Greeks becomes predominant. In common with oth- er arts, painting appears to have been estab- lished in Greece mainly through communica- tion with Egypt and Asia, and previous to the commencement of the 5th century B. 0. it was chiefly ornamental or representative, its application being limited to the decoration of temples, the coloring or imitation of bass re- liefs, and similar purposes. With the struggle against the Persians, the great promoter of in- tellectual activity among the Hellenic races, it began to assume its peculiar Greek character and to be practised as an independent art ; and from that era until after the death of Alexan- der it received its most perfect development. The whole period preceding the Persian inva- sion may be said to constitute the mythic age of Greek art, during which a slow but gradual ap- proximation toward excellence was observable, the motive for which must be traced to the character of the people and of their religion. Love of beauty was with the Greeks a religious principle ; their deities were models of physi- cal excellence, and their own habits tended to bring the human form to a high degree of per- fection. Hence, when painting and sculpture were made to subserve the cause of religion by representing to the eye the material forms of Greek mythology, the artist strove to clothe these with the attributes of majesty, loveliness, or grace; and this effort, continued through successive ages among a people of remarkable acuteness and intelligence, developed art from its original Egyptian rudeness and arbitrary conventionalism into life, motion, and liberty. The Egyptian artist reproduced for ages a fixed archaic type of the human figure, while his Greek successor aimed at an ideal perfec- tion, which made him the supreme master of expression and form. With the arrival of Polygnotus of Thasos in Athens, about 463 B. 0., begins the authentic history of Greek art, and the supremacy of Athens as the capital of the arts, although few of the great painters of Greece were natives of that city. Aristotle calls him jyfloypa^of, the painter of character, and he is mentioned by other Greek writers as one of the most distinguished painters of antiquity in the essentials of form, expression, and color. He was employed to decorate vari- ous public buildings in Athens, and also exe- cuted three famous pictures illustrating Ho- meric episodes for the Lesche, a public hall near the temple of Apollo at Delphi, which 600 years later excited the wonder and admira- tion of Pausanias. These works, however, can scarcely be called historical in the modern ac- ceptation of the word, as the events and objects were indicated rather than represented, and no attempt was made at dramatic development in composition or local truth and circumstantial detail of execution. Other celebrated painters of the Athenian school, of which Polygnotus is considered the founder, and contemporary with him, were Dionysius of Colophon, an ex- cellent portrait painter, of whom Aristotle says "he painted men as they are;" Micon, distin- guished for his horses; Pansenus of Athens, and Onatas of ^Egina. Somewhat later flour- ished Apollodorus, who about 404 B. 0. devel- oped the principles of light and shade. Ac- cording to Pliny, he was the inventor of tone. Painting, which had hitherto been sculptu- resque, now took a more dramatic range, and to the school of Athens succeeded that called the Asiatic or Ionic, of which Zeuxis, Par- rhasius, and Timanthes were the chief masters. It constitutes what may be called the second period of Greek painting, the school of Polyg- notus forming the first, and was characterized by greater unity of sentiment and action, and a close imitation of the local and accidental appearances of objects. Zeuxis and Parrhasius excelled in the representation of sensuous beauty, and, if inferior in simplicity and ex- pression to Polygnotus, greatly surpassed him in technical details. The " Helen " of Zeuxis was one of the wonders of ancient art, and the numerous pictures by Parrhasius of deities and heroes attained a high importance. Eupompus of Sicyon, the last very distinguished painter of this period, founded about the time of Philip of Macedon the Sicyonian school of painting, characterized by scientific cultivation, artistic knowledge, and great ease and accuracy in drawing, which constituted the third and last phase of Greek painting, or, as it has been called, the epoch of refinement. The form now became paramount over the essence, and tech- nical excellence reached its limit. The chief painters of this time were Pamphilus, chiefly distinguished as a teacher of the theory of his art; his pupils, Apelles, Melanthius, and Pau- sias, the first preeminent not less for grace or beauty of form than for his power in sublime subjects, the last named one of the first to prac- tise encaustic painting ; Protogenes of Rhodes, a rival of Apelles ; Nicias, who excelled in light and shade ; Euphranor, excellent in many