Page:History of Art in Primitive Greece - Mycenian Art Vol 1.djvu/24

Method and Plan pursued in this History. 3 should leave Persia out of account. As well have an argument without a conclusion, a drama shorn of the last act ; a general impression of incompleteness and unfinish would necessarily follow. There was yet another reason which imposed upon us the plan that we have adopted : all Greece knew of the Oriental world was its decadence. When her intercourse with the empires of the Nile and the Euphrates valleys began, these had long left behind them their youth and growth, aye, even their maturity. Their power was on the wane ; their art strove to make up what it had lost in rich invention and creative power by a somewhat affected grace and fineness. This was the case, in Egypt, for the Sait art. But when the Greeks began to visit that land, towards the middle of the seventh century b.c, they largely settled in the towns of the Delta, which had little else to show than buildings erected or repaired by the kings of the Twenty-sixth Dynasty ; monuments carrying impressed upon them the mark of that elegant style, verging on affectation, of which we have published several examples. As to that sculpture, the main characteristics of which were breadth, sincerity, and bold realism, which was known and prac- tised in Egypt at an earlier epoch, it then lay buried in the depths of her necropoles. Ionian artists who modelled clay or smelted bronze in the workshops of Naucratis, might have ran- sacked the whole of Lower Egypt without lighting on a specimen of those living and all but speaking images which the curiosity of our contemporaries has brought to the light of day. These remarks apply in full to Mesopotamian art. The only notion the Greeks got of it was through the Assyrian and Babylonian arts of the second empire, wherein conventionalism held a conspicuous place ; where, too, genuine specimens remarkable for boldness and frankness of touch, such as those that came from Tello, are exceedingly rare. Persian art is Asia's last- born child ; hence, whilst we insisted on characteristics that may fairly be claimed as its own, we could not part it from Egyptian and Assyrian arts, into which it strikes out all its roots. With regard to Phoenicia, how and where should we have dared to cut asunder her history, notable alike for rare sequence and unity ? The burden laid upon us was to show how, some