Fig. 3. Painting in the "House of Livia" on the Palatine Hill in Rome.
| Orpheus made into David. |
Orpheus made into David.Returning now to the above mentioned Psalter of the Vatican, the scribe, probably a Greek monk, who in the twelfth century painted this miniature[[26]], converted it into quite a different subject, that of David playing on the harp, by the simple device of ticketing each figure with a newly devised name. Orpheus is called "David," one of the Nymphs who sits affectionately close to Orpheus, probably meant for his wife Eurydice, is labelled "Sophia", "wisdom"; while the other two figures are converted into local personifications to indicate the locality of the scene.
It is not often that a mediaeval copyist has thus preserved unaltered the composition of a whole subject of classical and pre-Christian date, but it is not uncommon to find single figures or parts of pictorial designs of equally early date among the illuminations of the ninth to the twelfth centuries.
| Graeco-Roman personifications. |
Graeco-Roman personifications.As an example of this we may mention one painting in a Greek Psalter of the tenth century in the Paris library (Bibl. Nat. No. 139). This represents the Prophet Isaiah standing, gazing up to heaven, in a very beautiful landscape with trees growing from a richly flower-spangled sward. The somewhat stiff figure of the Prophet is Byzantine[[27]] rather than Classical in style, but the other two figures which are introduced are purely Graeco-Roman in design. On one side is a personification of Night (ΝΥΞ), a very graceful standing female figure with part of her drapery floating in the wind, forming a sort of curved canopy over her head, such as is so often represented above the heads of goddesses or nymphs on the reliefs of fine Graeco-Roman sarcophagi.
On the other side of the Prophet is a winged boy, like a youthful Eros, bearing a torch to symbolize the dawn.
Fig. 4. A Pompeian painting of Hellenic style, as an example of Greek drawing and composition.
| Classical style. |