Page:History of Art in Primitive Greece - Mycenian Art Vol 1.djvu/39

i8 Primitive Greece: Mycenian Art. it, of reproducing in its integrity the monuments of any one series as absurd and vain. To take at random a section of antiquities, here are the painted vases. The whole tale of fictile products exhumed up to 1 844 did not exceed 40,000 ; yet at that time scarcely any other were known, save such as had come out of the tombs of Etruria, Campania, and Apulia : how- much larger must not the number of these figures have become since they began to find vases elsewhere, in Venetia, the ^Emilia, and beyond the Italian peninsula in Sicily, Cyrene, and finally on the continent and the islands of Greece, where by far the finest of all were wrought.^ Were a list made out of all such monu- ments in this category as present points of real interest, whether from the painted subject, elegance of form, qualities of draughts- manship, or choice of colours, the number would exceed several thousands. It is plain however that, even in a work that should be exclusively devoted to a history of ceramic art, the single principal types which the industry of the Greek potter created could only be represented by a very small number of specimens, and would necessarily leave out of account secondary varieties. Owing to the habits of the Hellenic potter, his disinclination to repeat twice, nay, even once the same object, these varieties, it is not too much to say, are well nigh as many as the pieces themselves. If for example in a collection, it matters little which is selected, we examine the vases that came out of the same workshop, we shall find that no two specimens are exactly alike in every respect ; though bearing a general resemblance to one another, slight differences will be manifest here and there, be it in outline or the details of the decoration. The same impression of infinite variety is carried away, whether our observations fall on terra-cottas, jewellery, bronzes, or marbles. So deeply seated with the Greeks was their dislike to repetition, that workshops exclusively engaged in industrial products seldom resorted to mechanical aid for reproduction, which is so extensively employed by our trade. Like the sculptor and the painter, the artisan preferred to trust his own fingers in manipulating the material he had learnt how to model, and infused into it something of ^ According to M. E. Pottier's catalogue, there are about 6,700 vases in the Louvre, counting those of the Cabinet de la Bibliothbque nationale, and the Ceramic Museum at Sevres ; the total number of vases in the public collections of Paris is estimated at 10,000, Berlin has 4000, and Naples about 3000.