Page:History of Art in Primitive Greece - Mycenian Art Vol 2.djvu/259

2 14 Primitive Greece: Mycenian Art. 362, 363, and PI. XV.), or that delicate strokes were traced with the point, as on the daggers from Mycenae (Pis. XVII., XVIII., XIX.), where they contribute not a little to the fine modelling of the figures or to sharply define accessories. Time and the weather have wrought the destruction of the stucco lining, and left us with a sketchy bas-relief, a composition which gives but an im- perfect idea of the intrinsic merit of the sculpture and of its original effect. This conjectural view of the case is the only one that can with any plausibility be put forward to explain away the peculiar anomalies surrounding this stela, which Reichel has forcibly brought to our knowledge. If, as is not improbable, the stone of the other stelae was also protected by a lime facing, it is self-evident that stucco did hot play the same part on the well-prepared surfaces of this cippus as it did on that of the first stela. On the other hand, the main thing that strikes the beholder is the inferiority, from an artistic standpoint, of the carved figures seen on these cippi, compared with those of the first one. In the cippus with the spear the feet of the driver appear above the sides of the chariot ; an error which the en- graver avoided in a very similar representation beheld on one of the finest specimens of Mycenian glyptics (PI. XVI. 9). The charioteer, in the stela with a man running in front of the horse, looks as if at any moment he might fall forward ; whilst the proportions of the horses are unnaturally large. Finally, the work of some of the fragments is more like shockingly bad engraving- than sculpture (10, 13 in catalogue). Reichel is inclined to view the stela on which we have laid so much stress as perhaps the only one which dates from the interment of the bodies buried below. Agreeably with this hypothesis, most of the other stela; were re-handled when the slab-circle was set up and when the Lions Gate was built, doubtless with a change of dynasty. This conjecture we cannot accept. The domed-tombs are certainly coeval with the imposing bas-relief which is still admired at the entrance of the acropolis, and nothing about them betokens a decadent age. As demonstrated by the Vaphio vases, and other objects from the domed-graves of Attica, they knew how to draw the figure of a man or a horse with a precision not to be found in the sculptures seen about the stelae which we are invited to consider as most recent. Had the cippi been touched up at that epoch they would not bear traces of a clumsiness wrongly taken