Page:History of Art in Primitive Greece - Mycenian Art Vol 2.djvu/380

Characteristics of Mycenian Sculpture. 327 nature of the ground, are popped all over the place, to make It quite plain that the figures are moving between two stony walls. It is the same with the pair of trees to which a hunting- net is fastened ; they are planted opposite each other, the one near to the foot, the other close to the lip of the vase. It would be difficult to imagine aught more arbitrary than the perspective of the landscape. The spectator is supposed to look down upon the scene from a very elevated position, but the projection system does not extend to the figures. These are represented as if seen sideways, by a person standing on a plane with them. We have here a compromise between two different modes of figura- tion, or to speak more correctly, two modes in contradiction to each other. Is not the fact a significant one, that if we wish to find other examples of this strange combination we must fain turn to Mycenian art ? Look at the dagger (PI. XIX. 6), and several intaglios (Fig. 413, 414), and you will perceive the truth of our assertion ; for in one of these the landscape is only expressed above the heads of the figures (Fig. 419, 17). If, peradventure, the testimony of both gems and daggers should be challenged, that of the painted vases must stand. These are universally held to be native productions. Now rocks are depicted on more than one vase, amidst which nautili, polypi, and other mollusks are swimming, both in the upper and lower portions of the field : " The whole scene looks like the bottom of the sea perceived from a high cliff or the deck of a ship" (Fig. 429).^ However surprised we may have been at the sight of a work as advanced in some respects as the Vaphio goblets, we must give in to the evidence. There was no other reason or rather pretext for turning to Egypt or Phoenicia as the country of their birth, except the beauty of execution, the happy com- position of the double scene, the expressive vivacity of the movements, and the boldness of the design. Yet the charac- teristics which distinguish this art are found one by one in these vases ; and the same qualities return in other monuments pertaining thereto, though perhaps not carried to so high a level. For obvious reasons, the doubts which beset us here are absent as regards the golden masks. If the idea of thus covering the face of the dead may very well have been suggested to the ^ The observation is due to Murray, A Vase of the Mykcnai Type (Anterican Journal of Archaology).