The work of explorers on Greek sites requires as its complement and corrective much labour in the great museums of Europe. As museum work apart from exploration tends to dilettantism and pedantry, so exploration by itself does not produce reasoned knowledge. When a new building, a great original statue, a series of vases is discovered, these have to be fitted in to the existing frame of our knowledge; and it is by such fitting in that the edifice of knowledge is enlarged. In all the museums and universities of Europe the fresh examination of new monuments, the study of style and subject, and attempts to work out points in the history of ancient art, are incessantly going on. Such archaeological work is an important element in the gradual education of the world, and is fruitful, quite apart from the particular results attained, because it encourages a method of thought. Archaeology, dealing with things which can be seen and handled, yet being a species of historic study, lies on the borderland between the province of natural science and that of historic science, and furnishes a bridge whereby the methods of investigation proper to physical and biological study may pass into the human field.
These investigations and studies are recorded, partly in books, but more particularly in papers in learned journals (see bibliography), such as the Mitteilungen of the German Institute, and the English Journal of Hellenic Studies.
An example or two may serve to give the reader a clearer notion of the recent progress in the knowledge of Greek art.
To begin with architecture. Each of the palmary sites of which we have spoken has rendered up examples of early Greek temples. At Olympia there is the Heraeum, earliest of known temples of Greece proper, which clearly shows the process whereby stone gradually superseded wood as a constructive material. At Delphi the explorers have been so fortunate as to be able to put together the treasuries of the Cnidians (or Siphnians) and of the Athenians. The former (see fig. 17) is a gem of early Ionic art, with two Caryatid figures in front in the place of columns, and adorned with the most delicate tracery and fine reliefs. On the Athenian acropolis very considerable remains have been found of temples which were destroyed by the Persians when they temporarily occupied the site in 480 B.C. And recently the ever-renewed study of the Erechtheum has resulted in a restoration of its original form more valuable and trustworthy than any previously made.
In the field of sculpture recent discoveries have been too many and too important to be mentioned at any length. One instance may serve to mark the rapidity of our advance. When the remains of the Mausoleum were brought to London from the excavations begun by Sir Charles Newton in 1856 we knew from Pliny that four great sculptors, Scopas, Bryaxis, Leochares and Timotheus, had worked on the sculpture; but we knew of these artists little more than the names. At present we possess many fragments of two pediments at Tegea executed under the direction of Scopas, we have a basis with reliefs signed by Bryaxis, we have identified a group in the Vatican museum as a copy of the Ganymede of Leochares, and we have pedimental remains from Epidaurus which we know from inscriptional evidence to be either the works of Timotheus or made from his models. Any one can judge how enormously our power of criticizing the Mausoleum sculptures, and of comparing them with contemporary monuments, has increased.
In regard to ancient painting we can of course expect no such fresh illumination. Many important wail-paintings of the Roman age have been found at Rome and Pompeii: but we have no certain or even probable work of any great Greek painter. We have to content ourselves with studying the colouring of reliefs, such as those of the sarcophagi at Constantinople, and the drawings on vases, in order to get some notion of the composition and drawing of painted scenes in the great age of Greece. As to the portraits of the Roman age painted on wood which have come in considerable quantities from Egypt, they stand at a far lower level than even the paintings of Pompeii. The number of our vase-paintings, however, increases steadily, and whole classes, such as the early vases of Ionia, are being marked off from the crowd, and so becoming available for use in illustrating the history of Hellenic civilization.
The study of Greek art is thus one which is eminently progressive. It has over the study of Greek literature the immense advantage that its materials increase far more rapidly. And it is becoming more and more evident that a sound and methodic study of Greek art is quite as indispensable as a foundation for an artistic and archaeological education as the study of Greek poets and orators is as a basis of literary education. The extreme simplicity and thorough rationality of Greek art make it an unrivalled field for the training and exercise of the faculties which go to the making of the art-critic and art historian.
2. The General Principles of Greek Art.—Before proceeding to sketch the history of the rise and decline of Greek art, it is desirable briefly to set forth the principles which underlie it (see also P. Gardner’s Grammar of Greek Art).
As the literature of Greece is composed in a particular language, the grammar and the syntax of which have to be studied before the works in poetry and prose can be read, so Greek works of art are composed in what may be called an artistic language. To the accidence of a grammar may be compared the mere technique of sculpture and painting: to the syntax of a grammar correspond the principles of composition and grouping of individual figures into a relief or picture. By means of the rules of this grammar the Greek artist threw into form the ideas which belonged to him as a personal or a racial possession.
We may mention first some of the more external conditions of Greek art; next, some of those which the Greek spirit posited for itself.