Page:History of Art in Primitive Greece - Mycenian Art Vol 2.djvu/244

Idols. 201 belong to the closing days of the archaic period. What gives an air of remote antiquity to the Mycenian examples is their having preserved the metal jets — whereon rest the feet of the personages — which correspond to the holes through which the metal was introduced into the crucible. Had the chisel or file removed these appendages, as in the Abbia piece, both the bronzes and the lead statuette would appear much younger than many of the oldest bronzes that have come from Olympia. The sculptor who modelled these pieces has certainly yet much to learn ; but his progress will be rapid, unless arrested by some unforeseen accident in mid career. Was the Abbia figure, whose intrinsic merit from an artistic standpoint singles it out from among its fellows, also a divine simulacrum ? It is impossible to say. The action is complicated but not intelligible, and is never met again in any other object of that period. It vaguely recalls an athlete who rubs himself with a flesh-brush. As far as one can see, it has no ritualistic and consequently no religious meaning. If we have placed this figure in the idol series, it is because it helps us to define certain details of the costume. As regards the other statuettes, we think we have attributed to them all, from the most barbarous to those showing the greatest advance, the destination which their makers intended for and which pertains to them. One main reason for thinking that all are idols is this : Everywhere, as soon as the artistic sense awakes in man, the first boon he demands of it is that it shall enable him to exorcise the secret terrors which beset his troubled soul. To this end he procures fetiches, that is to say, objects wherein, he fondly imagines, are incorporated those mysterious forces whose thrall he cannot shake off, whose whims he perpetually dreads. This result he hopes to obtain by fashioning a form that shall approach as near as possible his notions of the Deity. As soon as he is capable of rough-hewing trachyte or marble, he carves in it the simulacra of his gods, so as to bring them close to him, and compel them to bear him company in his travels, and follow him, as benevolent patrons, to his last abode. The inhabitants of the coasts of the iCgean, like the vast majority of peoples, represented their gods under the sem- blance of man. In their anxiety to secure the benefits accruing from the possession of a tutelar fetich, they did not wait until they had gained some knowledge relating to the build of the