earliest theological and philosophical speculations of the race, blending religious tradition with the traditions of history, personified agencies with the agencies of real personages, the record of physical phenomena with poetic allegory,—so the Figurative Language of Art expanded to express this complex development. Mythography, or the expression of the Myth in Art, moved on, pari passu, with mythology, or the expression of the Myth in Literature: as one has reacted on the other, so is one the interpreter of the other.
It is impossible till we have studied both conjointly, to see how completely the religion of the Greeks penetrated into their social institutions and daily life. The Myth was not only embodied in the sculpture of Phidias on the Parthenon, or pourtrayed in the frescoes of Polygnotus in the Stoa Poicile; it was repeated in a more compendious and abbreviated form on the fictile vase of the Athenian household; on the coin which circulated in the marketplace; on the mirror in which the Aspasia of the day beheld her charms. Every domestic implement was made the vehicle of Figurative language, or fashioned into a Symbol.
Now, to us this mother tongue of Mythography, these household words, so familiar to the Greeks, are a dead letter, except so far as the Archaeologist can explain them by glosses and commentaries. His task is one of interpretation—he is the Scholiast and the Lexicographer of Art.
The method of interpretation which the classical Archaeologist has applied to Greek Art is well worthy the attention of those who undertake the interpretation of Christian Medieval Art.
As the Greeks have bequeathed to us not only a Mythology, but a Mythography, so in the painting and sculpture of medieval Christendom we find an unwritten Theology, a popular, figurative teaching of the sublime truths of Christianity, blended with the apocryphal traditions of many generations. The frescoes of the great Italian masters, from Giotto to Michael Angelo, the ecclesiastical sculpture of medieval Europe generally, are the texts in which we should study this unwritten theology.
It is in these continuous compositions, designed by great artists, that we can best study the Figurative and Symbolic language of Christian Art as a scheme, and seek the key to its interpretation. This key once obtained, we learn to read
