Page:The Journal of Classical and Sacred Philology, Volume 1, 1854.djvu/258

 248 Journal of Philology. wrote on painting. Surely when we meet with a statement in Pliny that staggers our incredulity (and of such there is no lack), we should carefully examine it in every conceivable respect before we pronounce it to be unsound, always remembering that, for ought we can tell, it may have been taken from the pages of an Apelles whose authority must in such matters, of course, be paramount. What I am anxious to impress upon the reader is, that there existed, that Pliny had himself access to, valuable works on ancient art in which its processes were doubtless described, its history in some degree recorded I want to fill him if I can with some adequate sense of the fulness and fresh- ness of the art-literature of Hellas : a field so little cultivated in this country, that I felt myself justified (not without much hesita- tion), in prefixing to the enquiry I have undertaken, a map of the country through which our road lies. That these works were written, most of them, in the autumn not the spring-tide of Hellenic art, is nothing more than what we should a priori ex- pect. Reasons herewith connected have already been incidentally advanced. Still, the bare fact of their existence is one to which we should tenaciously cling. It may help to untie many a knot in the history of Byzantine art, a history, I should observe, which as yet wants an historian : it may serve to explain how a great body of tradition on the processes of art was handed down : and more especially may it vindicate to ancient painting the position she deserves to occupy, and of which she has been de- prived, less by irresistible proof, than by irresistible damp. Art too has its apostolical succession. On the principle that we do not light candles in mid-day, I may content myself with the bare enumeration of the three illustrious artists last-mentioned. So also in the case of Proto- genes (01. civ.), and Xenocrates (01. cxxvi.), the first of whom is scarcely less famous in the annals of ancient art, while the second gives us no handle for comment from his comparative obscurity. Pasiteles (b.c. 30), again, whose name the manu- scripts of Pliny not unfrequently confound with Praxiteles, may likewise be dismissed with the statement that he wrote "quinque volumina nobilium operum in toto orbe." Two names however remain on our list of artist- authors, which remind us of certain dangers Horace has attached to brevity obscurus jio. Harpo- cration (s. v. novyva>Tos) refers to a certain 'Aprtfiap iv ro> ntpl faypa-