And I am not sure that the plan might not be adopted with advantage in museums, of having a small room, like the tribuna at Florence for instance, with a florilegium of the best things of all dates; it would be both physically and mentally a boon to many a weary wayfarer. ¶ The most obvious point of comparison with the classical is the work of the classicists of north-east Italy, who, already at the end of the trecento, were beginning a formal but intelligent study of the antique. It would be instructive to see works of Donatello and John of Bologna side by side with their Greek counterparts; a Syracusan decadrachm of Kimon or Euainetos beside a medal of Pisanello or Sperandio. ¶ One bronze in the Burlington Club especially seems to challenge this comparison—the big mounted warrior (No. 53), which at first sight suggests a kind of glorified gothic aquamanile. A reviewer in the Athenaeum points out the ‘research for elegance which already characterizes this figure,’ and which he considers to mark the essential difference between the Greeks and their successors. ‘Whereas the Greek,’ he says, ‘feels most keenly the planes, to the northern and Italian artists it is the ridges that count.’ This seems to me to be a plausible generalization from imperfectly perceived facts. The world-old contrast of the ideal and the real naturally went on in Greek art as it has gone on in every other art; but less among the Greeks, because for most of their history they steadily withstood realism; they believed and acted upon Shakespeare’s ‘Nature is made better by no mean, but nature makes that mean.’ At a late period realism became too strong for them, and the Pergamene school was the beginning of the end. Surely the broad contrasting of planes is not the characteristic of a race, but of a stage of development. Obviously the sculptor in marble or wood is bound to set out by blocking out his figure in broad planes: relative development shows itself in the amount of skill which the artist exhibits in graduating and refining these planes into each other. Early Greek art shows this particularly, because it derived largely from Egyptian traditions, and was long in breaking loose from set canons. But it is none the less true of all sculpture in which an historical development can be traced. The history of Italian sculpture down to Michael Angelo is so much under classical influence that its evolution may almost be said to be an index of its information regarding Greek art. Michael Angelo unfortunately corresponds to the Pergamene stage. Already, before his day, the great Italian medallists had shown in their medal work what is probably, outside of classical times, the nearest approach to the best Greek relief, and they worked largely on Greek lines. It is not by coincidence alone that the helmeted knight on the well-known medal of Ludovico Gonzaga naturally suggests an analogy to the bronze now exhibited. In both cases the simple effect is attained by a judicious elimination, by contrasted planes, and by a skilful co-ordination into an harmonious whole. ¶ This bronze is said to have been found at Grumentum, in Lucania, a city which, as its name and its geographical position show, was never a Greek colony, though latterly a town of some importance. Probably it found its way there in the course of Corinthian traffic: the long-bodied horse, the unusual subject of a helmeted horseman, the treatment of mane and tail, are all characteristic rather of the Corinthian art of the sixth century B.C.; and we know how active the Corinthian colonists were at that period in south Italy. ¶ The same characteristic treatment is seen in the splendid bronze head from Chatsworth (No. 8). It is an Apollo rather over life size, belonging to that interesting transitional stage which immediately precedes the Parthenon. In this case, however, the archaism is partly conscious; the artist realizes the maxim peu de moyens, beaucoup d’effet, and uses it to advantage. The type chosen is that of a strong virile athlete, with hair still long, but just budding into manhood, the Βούπαις (‘bully boy’), as Furtwängler points out, of an epigram on a contemporary statue of him by Onatas. What a contrast this to the soft and dreamy Sauroktonos of the succeeding century: with its almost architectural symmetry, its vigorous subordination of all search for detail to general effect, and its mathematical balance of large lines and large planes, it seems to stand as a visible protest against weakness and effeminacy. As Emerson puts it, this one head might be the indemnification for populations of pygmies or weaklings. The step from this to the Parthenon is short in point of years, but is artistically an interval which is strongly defined, for within its limit Greek sculpture has entered into its birthright. This stage is nobly represented in the exhibition by the fragment from a slab of the north frieze of the Parthenon, reproduced in Plate I. Broken away probably at the time of the Venetian bombardment, it seems to have been acquired in Athens by Stuart, who sent it to Smyrna; a few years ago it was dug up beside a rockery in a garden in Essex; what its movements were between Smyrna and Essex is matter for conjecture. A former owner of the Essex property was a Mr. Astle, who was a trustee of the British Museum, and may be supposed to have had an interest in antiquities: habent sua fata, these flotsam relics of antiquity: this is not the only marble in the exhibition which has been excavated on English soil. The head (No. 24), which early in the seventeenth century belonged to the famous Arundel collection, was recently dug up by a navvy in London close to the Temple, on the site that was once part of the Arundel house garden. ¶ The surface of the Parthenon fragment has suffered, of course, but not so grievously as might be expected. It gives the head of one of the mounted knights of the north frieze, and the horse’s head of the figure immediately following him. The youth is from northern Greece, probably from one of the Thracian colonies of Athens, as his Thracian headdress of foxskin (the alopeke) shows. That his horse is in movement even the fragment makes clear by the light tresses of hair blown backward beneath his cap, of which the heavy tail is itself curved outward by the motion; but his eyes are intently set on his forward path, and the firm and straight yet supple poise of neck and torso bespeak his ‘magic horsemanship.’ The figure behind him (preserved in the British Museum), a squadron commander or marshal, turns partly round in his seat, checking his horse, apparently to give an order to his section; with the suddenness of the action the horse’s mouth is wrenched open and his head thrown back, the plaited forelock swings upward, and every muscle is tense; the motive is a subtle variation on the theme represented by the splendid horse’s head of Selene or Night in the eastern pediment, but with this principal difference, that while this horse is answering to its rider’s curb, the Selene horse is probably starting back of its own accord, in alarm at taking the downward plunge. Now that this beautiful fragment has found its way to London, is it too much to hope that it may make one more journey—and that its last—to Bloomsbury, and rejoin the slab to which it fits?
PLATE IV—BRONZES
SMALL BRONZES: HANDLE OF AMPHORA BELONGING TO MR. WYNDHAM COOK; MASK OF SEA DEITY BELONGING TO MR. GEORGE SALTING; PLAQUE BELONGING TO MR. H. WALLIS
APHRODITE WITH TORCH, BELONGING TO MR. J. E. TAYLOR
SICK MAN, BELONGING TO MR. WYNDHAM COOK
SEILENOS CROUCHING, BELONGING TO MR. J. E. TAYLOR