Volume I Part 1 (2/2)
Again, the first part of Herr Schnaase's work is already seventeen years old, and how many important discoveries have taken place since 1865? Those of Cesnola and Schliemann, for instance, have revealed numberless points of contact and transmission between one phase of antique art and another, which were never thought of twenty years ago
The book therefore is not ”down to date” With all the iht introduce, that part of it which deals with antiquity can never be anything but an abridgment with the faults inherent in that kind of work It could never have the ainality which made Winckelmann's _History of Art_ and Ottfried Muller's _Manual of Artistic Archaeology_ so successful in their day[4]
[4] Ger felt the hich Schnaase atteler published his _Handbuch der Kunstgeschichte_, which embraces the whole history of art from the earliest times down to our own day The book was successful; the fourth edition, revised and corrected by Wilhelart), lies before us, but to give an idea of its inadequacy as a history of ancient art, it is enough to say that the whole of the antique period, both in Greece and Asia, occupies no es of the first voluood in quality, and their source is never indicated; the draughtsman has taken little care to reproduce with fidelity the style of the originals or to call attention to their peculiarities; finally, the arrangements adopted betray the defects of a severely scientific method The author commences with Celtic monuments (dolmens and menhirs), and then passes to the structures of Oceania and Aypt he takes us to Mexico and Yucatan Lubke, whilst still occupied with the work of Kugler, wished to supply for the use of students and artists a book of a more elementary character; he therefore published in 1860 an 8vo volueschichte_; the antique here occupies 208 pages out of 720 His plan seeler; he follows a geographical instead of an historical arrangeins with the extreypt, and India before assyria His illustrations are soler, but many of the cuts are common to both works
Under the title _Geschichte der Plastik_, Overbeck and Lubke have each written a comprehensive history of sculpture [The word ”comprehensive” must here be understood in a strictly lie of Ger--it comprises sculpture only The work of Overbeck, far superior to that of Lubke, deserves the success which has attended it; the third edition, which contains the results of the searches at Olyamus, is now in course of publication
Winckelinally published in 1764, is one of those rare books which mark an epoch in the history of the human intellect The German writer was the first to forences, that art springs up, flourishes, and decays, with the society to which it belongs; in a word, that it is possible to write its history[5]
This great _savant_, whose memory Gery, was not content with stating a principle: he followed it through to its consequences; he began by tracing the outlines of the science which he founded, and he never rested till he had filled them in However, now that a century has passed away since it appeared, his great work, which even yet is never opened without a sentiment of respect,penetrated Winckelyptian art was confined to the _pasticcios_ of the Roures which passed from the villa of Hadrian to the museum of Cardinal Albani Chaldaea and assyria, Persia and Phnicia, had no existence for him; even Greece as a whole was not known to him Her painted vases were still hidden in Etruscan and Campanian ceht had not yet succeeded in drawing the attention ofenius Nearly all Winckeliven to the works of the sculptors, upon which ard to them, he was not well-informed His opportunities of personal inspection were confined to the figures, alleries The great majority of these formed part of the crowd of copies which issued from the workshops of Greece, for some three centuries or more, to embellish the temples, the basilicas, and the public baths, the villas and the palaces of the masters of the world In the very few instances in which they were either originals or copies executed with sufficient care to be fair representations of the original, they never dated from an earlier epoch than that of Praxiteles, Scopas, and Lysippus Phidias and Alcareat masters of the fifth century, were only known to the historian by the descriptions and allusions of the ancient authors
[5] Winckelmann's History of Ancient Art should be read in connection with his Remarks upon the History of Art, which is a kind of supplement to it, and takes the place of that new edition of which the author's preic death deprived the world It is an answer to the objections which made themselves heard on every side; the preface to _Monumenti inediti_ (Rome, 1867, 2 vols in folio, with 208 plates) should also be read The method of Winckelmann is there most clearly explained Finally, the student of the life and labours of Winckel work of Carl Iusti, _Winckelenossen_, which will give hiy at the tiher footing
In such a case as this the clearest and most precise of verbal descriptions is of less value than any fragment of marble upon which the hand of the artist is still to be traced Who would then have guessed that the following generation would have the opportunity of studying those splendid groups of decorative sculpture whose close relation to the architecture of certain faht us soat, still less of drawing, the statues in the pediments and sculptured friezes of the Parthenon, of the Thesaeualia, or at Olynorant of these, the real monuments of classic perfection, it follows that he was hardly couish the works of sculpture which bore the marks of the deliberate, eclectic, and over-polished taste of the critical epochs Heof architecture It was always, or nearly always, by the edifices of Roee the architecture of Greece
But Winckel a a[6] and by Ennio Quirino Visconti,[7] to the description of the works which filled public and private galleries, or were being continually discovered by excavation
These two _savants_ classified a vast quantity of facts; thanks to their incessant labours, the lines of the h sketch were accented and corrected at more than one point; the divisions which he had introduced into his picture were un to form were rendered more coherent and compact; their features becaress was continuous, but after the great wars of the Revolution and the E peace which saw the growth of so rich a harvest of talent, was also y hich all kinds of historical studies were prosecuted
[6] Zoega busied hi the study of Coptic prepared the way for Cha the chief scholars of Winckelmann is unfinished; the _Bassirilievi antichi di Roma_ (Rome, 2 vols 4to 1808) only contains the raved by Piroli, with the help of the celebrated Piranesi A voluiven to the world by Welcker in 1817 (_Abhandlungen herausgegeben und en), who also published his life and a volu seiner Briefe und Beurtheilung seiner Werke_, 2 vols 8vo Stuttgart, 1819)
[7] _Il Museo Pio-Clementino_, Visconti, vol i 1782; by Enn
Quir Visconti, vols ii to vii Rome, 1784-1807 _Museum Worsleyanum_, 2 vols folio London, 1794 _Monumenti Gabini della Villa Pinciana_, Visconti, 8vo 1797 _Description des Antiques du Musee Royal_, begun by Visconti and continued by the Comte de Clarac 12mo Paris, 1820 For the collection of the raphie Grecque et Roe of his opportunities as director of the _Musee Napoleon_, into which the art treasures of all Europe, except England, were collected at the beginning of this century
But the widest, as well as the ement of the horizon was due to a rapid succession of discoveries, so searches and lucky excavations, others rendered possible by feats of induction which alh a curtain were drawn up, and, behind the rich and brilliant scenery of Graeco-Roman civilization, the real ancient world, the world of the East, the father of religions and of useful inventions, of the alphabet and of the plastic arts, were suddenly revealed to us The great hich was coypt first introduced the antiquities of that country to us, and not long afterwards Chalyphics, and thus enabled us to assign to the monuments of the country at least a relative date
A little later Layard and Botta freed Nineveh froht upon ancient assyria But yesterday we knew nothing beyond the naain to the day, its monuments in marvellous preservation, its history pictured by thousands of figures in relief and narrated by their acco keep their secrets to themselves, and their interpretation enables us to classify chronologically the works of architecture and sculpture which have been discovered
The information thus obtained was supplemented by careful exploration of the ruins in Babylonia, lower Chaldaea, and Susiana These had been less tenderly treated by ti ruins of the palace at Persepolis and of the tos, had been known for nearly two centuries, but only by the inadequate descriptions and feeble drawings of early travellers
Ker-Porter, Texier, and Flandrin provided us with more accurate and comprehensive descriptions, and, thanks to their careful copies of the writings upon the walls of those buildings, and upon the inscribed stones of Persia and Media, Eugene Burnouf succeeded in reconstructing the alphabet of Darius and Xerxes
Thus, to the toils of artists and learned men, who examined the country from the mountains of Armenia to the low and marshy plains of Susiana, and from the deserts which border the Euphrates to the rocks of Media and Persia, and to the philologists who deciphered the texts and classified the ments which had travelled so far from the scene of their creation, e our power to describe, upon a sound basis and froreat civilisation which was developed in Western Asia, in the basin of the Persian Gulf There were still h the shadohich every day helped to dissipate, the essential outlines and the leading uished, and the local distinctions which, in such a vast extent of country and so long a succession of empires, were caused by differences of race, of tian to be appreciated But, in spite of all these differences, the choice of expressive means and their employment, from Babylon to Nineveh, and from Nineveh to Susa and Persepolis, presented sosimilarity as to prove that the various peoples represented by those fainal stock The ele and of the arts are in each case identical The alphabets were all for the variety in the languages which they served In the plastic arts, although the plans of their buildings vary in obedience to the requirements of different materials, their sculpture always betrays the sa forms, the same conventions and the same motives Every work fashi+oned by the hand of iven above, displays coin and tradition
The result of these searches and discoveries was to show clearly that this ancient civilisation had sprung froinal sources, the one in the valley of the Nile, the other in Chaldaea The latter was the less ancient of the two, and was considerably nearer our own ti series of Egyptian dynasties by the reign of Menes These two civilizations ency of the Phnicians, and any active and prolific interchange of ideas and products began, traces of which are still to be found both in Egypt and assyria
It still remained doubtful, and the doubt has but lately been rereat centres of cultivation was extended to the still barbarous tribes, the ancestors of the Greeks and Romans, who inhabited the northern and eastern shores of the Mediterranean
It is only within the last twenty years, since the mission of M
Renan, that Phnicia has becolish and French travellers, Ha others, had already, in the first half of the century, described the curious ia, Cappadocia, and of the still more picturesque Lycia, whose spoils now enrich the British Museuh those countries had progressed, stage by stage, from the east to the west, the forms and inventions of a system of civilization which had been elaborated in the distant Chaldaea But it was not till 1861 that an expedition, inspired by the desire to clear up this very question, succeeded in de the _role_ actually played by the peoples inhabiting the plateau of Asia Minor As for Cyprus, it was but yesterday that the explorations of Lang and Cesnola revealed it to us, with its art half Egyptian and half assyrian, and its cuneiform alphabet pressed into the service of a Greek dialect These discoveries have put us on the alert Not a year passes without some lucky ”find,” such as that of the Palaestrina treasure, in the ihbourhood of Roood fortune allow the archaeologist to supply, one by one, thelinks of the chain which attaches the arts of Greece and Italy to the earlier civilizations of Egypt and assyria