Names like those of Eucheir and
Eugrammus, who were said to have taken the art of baking clay vases
from Samos to Etruria, have still a legendary air, yet may be real
surnames; as in the case of Smilis, whose name is derived from a
graver's tool, and who made the ancient image of Here at Samos.
Corinth--mater statuariae--becomes a great nursery of art at an early
time. Some time before the twenty-ninth Olympiad, Butades of Sicyon,
the potter, settled there. The record of [231] early inventions in
Greece is sometimes fondly coloured with human sentiment or incident.
It is on the butterfly wing of such an incident--the love-sick
daughter of the artist, who outlines on the wall the profile of her
lover as he sleeps in the lamplight, to keep by her in absence--that
the name of Butades the potter has come down to us. The father fills
up the outline, long preserved, it was believed, in the Nymphaeum at
Corinth, and hence the art of modelling from the life in clay. He
learns, further, a way of colouring his clay red, and fixes his masks
along the temple eaves.
The temple of Athene Chalcioecus--Athene of the brazen house--at
Sparta, the work of Gitiades, celebrated about this time as
architect, statuary, and poet; who made, besides the image in her
shrine, and besides other Dorian songs, a hymn to the goddess--was so
called from its crust or lining of bronze plates, setting forth, in
richly embossed imagery, various subjects of ancient legend.
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