Only those to whom such
artistic objects manifest themselves through real and powerful
impressions of their wonderful qualities, can invest them with
properties magical or miraculous.
I said that the inherent usefulness of the material of metal-work
makes the destruction of its acquired form almost certain, if it
comes into the possession of people either barbarous or careless of
the work of a past time. Greek art is for us, in all its stages, a
fragment only; in each of them it is necessary, in a somewhat
visionary manner, to fill up empty spaces, and more or less make
substitution; and of the finer work of the heroic age, thus dimly
discerned as an actual thing, we had at least till recently almost
nothing. Two plates of bronze, a few rusty nails, and certain rows
of holes in the inner surface of the walls of the "treasury" of
Mycenae, were the sole representatives of that favourite device of
primitive Greek art, the lining of stone walls with burnished metal,
of which the house of Alcinous in the Odyssey is the ideal picture,
and the temple of Pallas of the Brazen House at Sparta, adorned in
the interior with a coating of reliefs in metal, a later, historical
example.
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