C. Of this period we possess, indeed, no direct history,
and but few actual monuments, great or small; but as to its whole
character and outward local colouring, for its art, as for its
politics and religion, Homer may be regarded as an authority. The
Iliad and the Odyssey, the earliest pictures of that heroic life,
represent it as already delighting itself in the application of
precious material and skilful handiwork to personal and domestic
adornment, to the refining and beautifying of the entire outward
aspect of life; above all, in the lavish application of very graceful
metal-work to such purposes. And this representation is borne out by
what little we possess of its actual remains, and by all we can
infer. Mixed, of course, with mere fable, as a description of the
heroic age, the picture which Homer presents to us, deprived of its
supernatural adjuncts, becomes continuously more and more realisable
as the actual condition of early art, when we emerge gradually into
historical time, and find ourselves at last among dateable works and
real schools or masters.
The history of Greek art, then, begins, as some have fancied general
history to begin, in a [193] golden age, but in an age, so to speak,
of real gold, the period of those first twisters and hammerers of the
precious metals--men who had already discovered the flexibility of
silver and the ductility of gold, the capacity of both for infinite
delicacy of handling, and who enjoyed, with complete freshness, a
sense of beauty and fitness in their work--a period of which that
flower of gold on a silver stalk, picked up lately in one of the
graves at Mycenae, or the legendary golden honeycomb of Daedalus,
might serve as the symbol.
Pages:
205
206
207
208
209
210
211
212
213
214
215
216
217
218
219
220
221
222
223
224
225
226
227
228
229