The Museo at Syracuse, though small, is the best in Europe, for here, as on an open page, is written the whole history of the island of Sicily—not a gap or a break in the story of more than three thousand years; of perhaps five thousand years, for it antedates all the certain dates of history. Here are cases full of the stone and obsidian tools and weapons of the autochthonous Sikels; their crude pottery, their rough burial urns, their bone ornaments, and feathery wisps of their woven stuffs. These are all curiously like the relics of the Mound-builders of America, now in the Smithsonian Institution. Apparently the Stone Age was as deadeningly similar everywhere as is our own Age of Steel.
Follows the rude metal working of the Siculians, who, having some knowledge of the use of iron, can build boats, and come across the narrow strait at Messina and drive out the Sikels. So long ago as that the old process of “assimilation” begins. The Siculians begin to work in colour, to ornament their pottery, to dye their stuffs, to mark their silver and iron with rough chisel patterns—patterns and colours again astonishingly like those of our own Pueblo Indians.
There are fragments of Phœnician work here and there—the traders from Tyre and Sidon are beginning to cruise along the coast and barter their superior wares with the inhabitants.
All at once the arts make a great spring upward. The Greeks have appeared. Rude, archaic, Dorian, these arts at first, but strong, and showing a new spirit. The potteries have a glaze, the patterns grow more intricate, the reliefs show a plastic striving for grace and life, the ornaments are of gold as well as silver and bronze, and steel has appeared. Follows a splendid flowering; an apogee of beauty is reached. Vases of exquisite contours covered with spirited paintings, pictures of life and death, of war and love. Coins that are unrivaled in numismatic beauty; struck frequently with the quadriga to celebrate the winning of the chariot race at the Olympic games; a triumph valued as greatly by the Greeks of Sicily as is the winning of the Derby by English horsemen. Tools, jewels, arms, all adorned with infinite taste and skill. Statues of such subtle grace and loveliness as this famous “Nymph,” the long-buried marble now grown to tints of blond pearl. Figurines of baked clay, reproducing the costumes, the ornaments, the physiology of the passing generations—faces arch, lovely, full of gay humour. Splendid sarcophagi, and burial urns still holding ashes and calcined bones, and tiny clay reproductions of the death masks of the departed, full of tender human individuality, or else heads of the gods, such as that enchanting tinted and crowned Artemis, that still lies in one of the great sarcophagi amid a handful of burned bones.
Punic and Roman remains begin to show themselves, recording that tremendous struggle between Europe and Africa for dominion in the midland sea, under the impact of which the Greek civilization is to be crushed. Byzantine ornament appears. Africa makes another struggle and is for a while triumphant, leaving record of the Moorish domination in damascened arms, in deep-tinted tiles.
The Goths and Normans fuse with the Saracen arts at first, but soon dominate the Eastern influence and shake it off, developing an art inferior only to the Greek. The Spanish follow, baroque, sumptuous, pseudo-classical. All the story of all the conquerors is here.
“Oh!” sighs Peripatetica. “What an illustrated history; I could go on turning its pages for days.”
“Well, you’ll turn them alone!” snapped Jane, clutching frantically at her side, and adding in a dreadful whisper: “There are fleas hopping all over these historical pages. Come away this instant.”
But they linger a moment on the way out to look again at the famous headless Venus Landolina.
“There is only one real Venus,” commented Peripatetica contemptuously. “The Melian. All the rest are only plump ladies about to step into their baths. I detest these fat women with insufficient clothing who sprawl all over Europe calling themselves the goddesses of love. Goddesses indeed! They look more like soft white chestnut worms. That great dominating, irresistible lady of the Louvre is a deity, if you like—Our Lady of Beauty—besides, this little person’s calf is flat on the inner side.”