The Bases of Design

by Walter Crane

The soul is commonly represented as being borne in a boat, or barge, with curved stem and stern, terminating in lotus flowers. (The lotus symbolized new birth and resurrection.) The food for the journey is shown in the urns placed underneath the couch. Two mourners or watchers accompany it.

There is a copy of a large painting from Thebes in the British Museum showing the judgment of the soul; the Devourer, a monster part crocodile part hippopotamus, standing ready to devour the soul if the verdict is unfavourable. Further on the accepted soul appears before Osiris.

The goddess Nut (the heavens) is frequently painted upon the sarcophagi and mummy cases in the form of a seated or kneeling figure of a woman with very large wings outspread and curving upwards; she holds in her hands the feather—the symbol of power or domination. (We still speak of the feather in the cap.) She bears the disk of the sun upon her head. To the Egyptians, indeed, we owe the very embodiment of the mystery of existence itself—the sphinx who continues to propound her riddle afresh to every age.

EXAMPLES OF EGYPTIAN SYMBOLISM.

Greek mythology again, as exemplified in Greek art, expresses itself symbolically, and shows a gradual development from the primitive, ruder, and often savage personification of the powers of nature, more allied to the conceptions of the Northmen, to the idealized, refined, poetic and beautiful personifications of their later vase painting and Phidian sculpture. The symbolic intention and the personifying method was carried on and embodied in free and natural forms, though always governed by the ornamental feeling and necessities of harmonious relation to architectural and decorative conditions.

The first observers of the heavens, the primitive herdsman, hunter, the fisherman and the shepherd, have left their symbolic heraldry in the very stars above our heads; and Charles's or ceorls' wain and the signs of the zodiac still remind us of the primitive life of a pastoral and agricultural people.

The pediments of the Parthenon, for instance, are great pieces of symbolical art, and at the same time most beautiful as figure design and sculpture. It is distressing to think that so late as 1687 the Parthenon was practically complete as far as its sculpture and architecture. It was first used as a Greek Christian Church during the Middle Ages, and then, falling into the hands of the Turks, became a mosque; when the Venetians bombarded Athens in 1687 a shell dropped into the Parthenon, where the Turks had stored their powder, and blew out the whole centre of the building. Even in the broken and imperfect state in which we are now only able to see them, from the more or less complete figures and groups which compose its parts, we can gather an idea of the harmony and unity of the whole, and the complete union of the symbolism with the artistic treatment. The whole conception strongly appealed to the sentiment of the Athenian citizen, since the two pediments represented the contest of Athene and Poseidon for the patronage of Athens, arts and laws, or the rule of the sea. We all know that the arts and laws won, and that Athens is immortal by reason of her art and poetry and philosophy, not by her command of the sea. We modern English, perhaps, might do well to apply the lesson, and consider that after all it is not in mere appropriation of riches, extension of empire, material prosperity, or in our volume of trade, that the true greatness of a country consists, but in the capacity and heroism of her people.

In the eastern pediment the centre group expressed the birth of Athene herself, or rather her first appearance amongst the Olympians—the divine virgin deity and protectress of the city which bore her name, and whose colossal statue in ivory and gold stood on the Acropolis in front of the Parthenon. The other deities are grouped around, and on one side we have the Parcæ, the three fates controlling the life of man (which the Northmen embodied in the Norns); then, reclining at one side where the pediment narrows, the figure of the great Athenian hero, Theseus; and in the extreme angle the sun-god, Helios, with outstretched arms is seen guiding his horses, which emerge from the sea—being balanced at the corresponding angle by Selene, the moon, descending with her horses into the sea. Thus, we have a series of ideas expressed symbolically in heroic figures of deep import to the Athenians, and having also in the suggestion of the fateful control of human life, and the continuous order of nature in the rising sun and setting moon, a wide and lasting significance apart from the beautiful form and consummate art by which they are embodied.

The Parthenon stands high upon a rocky eminence, and from its western door you can see the blue Ægean Sea, the island of Salamis, and the harbour of Athens, the Piræus. Accordingly the sea-god Poseidon is sculptured upon the western pediment, with Cecrops, the first king and founder of Athens, with the queen. Another conspicuous figure there is the reclining figure of Ilissus, who represents the stream that flows around the western side of the Acropolis. The Greeks, and the Romans who borrowed from them, always symbolized a stream or a fountain by a reclining figure, half turned upon its side, and very frequently leaning upon an urn placed horizontally, from the mouth of which flows the wavy lines of water.