I. THE ORNAMENTATION OF LIFE
“IT is beautiful,” says a character in Xenophon’s Economics,
to see the footgear ranged in a row according to its kind; beautiful to see garments sorted according to their use, and coverlets; beautiful to see glass vases and tableware so sorted; and beautiful, too, despite the jeers of the witless and flippant, to see cooking-pots arranged with sense and symmetry. Yes, all things without exception, because of symmetry, will appear more beautiful when placed in order. All these utensils will then seem to form a choir; the center which they unite to form will create a beauty that will be enhanced by the distance of the other objects in the group.1
This passage from a general reveals the scope, simplicity, and strength of the esthetic sense in Greece. The feeling for form and rhythm, for precision and clarity, for proportion and order, is the central fact in Greek culture; it enters into the shape and ornament of every bowl and vase, of every statue and painting, of every temple and tomb, of every poem and drama, of all Greek work in science and philosophy. Greek art is reason made manifest: Greek painting is the logic of line, Greek sculpture is a worship of symmetry, Greek architecture is a marble geometry. There is no extravagance of emotion in Periclean art, no bizarrerie of form, no striving for novelty through the abnormal or unusual;* the purpose is not to represent the indiscriminate irrelevancy of the real, but to catch the illuminating essence of things, and to portray the ideal possibilities of men. The pursuit of wealth, beauty, and knowledge so absorbed the Athenians that they had no time for goodness. “I swear by all the gods,” says one of Xenophon’s banqueters, “that I would not choose the power of the Persian king in preference to beauty.”3
The Greek, whatever the romanticists of less virile ages may have fancied of him, was no effeminate esthete, no flower of ecstasy murmuring mysteries of art for art’s sake; he thought of art as subordinate to life, and of living as the greatest art of all; he had a healthy utilitarian bias against any beauty that could not be used; the useful, the beautiful, and the good were almost as closely bound together in his thought as in the Socratic philosophy.* In his view art was first of all an adornment of the ways and means of life: he wanted his pots and pans, his lamps and chests and tables and beds and chairs to be at once serviceable and beautiful, and never too elegant to be strong. Having a vivid “sense of the state,” he identified himself with the power and glory of his city, and employed a thousand artists to embellish its public places, ennoble its festivals, and commemorate its history. Above all, he wished to honor or propitiate the gods, to express his gratitude to them for life or victory; he offered votive images, lavished his resources upon his temples, and engaged statuaries to give to his gods or his dead an enduring similitude in stone. Hence Greek art belonged not to a museum, where men might go to contemplate it in a rare moment of esthetic conscience, but to the actual interests and enterprises of the people; its “Apollos” were not dead marbles in a gallery, but the likenesses of beloved deities; its temples no mere curiosities for tourists, but the homes of living gods. The artist, in this society, was not an insolvent recluse in a studio, working in a language alien to the common citizen; he was an artisan toiling with laborers of all degrees in a public and intelligible task. Athens brought together, from all the Greek world, a greater concourse of artists, as well as of philosophers and poets, than any other city except Renaissance Rome; and these men, competing in fervent rivalry and cooperating under enlightened statesmanship, realized in fair measure the vision of Pericles.
Art begins at home, and with the person; men paint themselves before they paint pictures, and adorn their bodies before building homes. Jewelry, like cosmetics, is as old as history. The Greek was an expert cutter and engraver of gems. He used simple tools of bronze—plain and tubular drills, a wheel, and a polishing mixture of emery powder and oil;5 yet his work was so delicate and minute that a microscope was probably required in executing the details, and is certainly needed in following them.6 Coins were not especially pretty at Athens, where the grim owl ruled the mint. Elis led all the mainland in this field, and towards the close of the fifth century Syracuse issued a dekadrachma that has never been surpassed in numismatic art. In metalwork the masters of Chalcis maintained their leadership; every Mediterranean city sought their iron, copper, and silver wares. Greek mirrors were more pleasing than mirrors by their nature can frequently be; for though one might not see the clearest of reflections in the polished bronze, the mirrors themselves were of varied and attractive shapes, often elaborately engraved, and upheld by figures of heroes, fair women, or gods.
The potters carried on the forms and methods of the sixth century, with their traditional banter and rivalry. Sometimes they burnt into the vase a word of love for a boy; even Pheidias followed this custom when he carved upon the finger of his Zeus the words, “Pantarkes is fair.”7 In the first half of the fifth century the red-figure style reached its apex in the Achilles and Penthesilea vase, the Aesop and the Fox cup in the Vatican, and the Berlin Museum Orpheus among the Thracians. More beautiful still were the white lekythoi of the midcentury; these slender flasks were dedicated to the dead, and were usually buried with them, or thrown upon the pyre to let their fragrant oils mingle with the flames. The vase painters ventured into individuality, and sometimes fired the clay with subjects that would have startled the staid masters of the Archaic age; one vase allows Athenian youths to embrace courtesans shamelessly; another shows men vomiting as they come from a banquet; other vases do what they can for sex education.8 The heroes of Periclean vase painting—Brygus, Sotades, and Meidias—abandoned the old myths, and chose scenes from the life of their times, delighting above all in the graceful movement of woman and the natural play of the child. They drew more faithfully than their predecessors: they showed the body in three-quarters view as well as in profile; they produced light and shade by using thin or thick solutions of the glaze; they modeled the figures to show contours and depth, and the folds of feminine drapery. Corinth and Sicilian Gela were also centers of fine vase painting in this age, but no one questioned the superiority of the Athenians. It was not the competition of other potters that overcame the artists of the Ceramicus; it was the rise of a rival art of decoration. The vase painters tried to meet the attack by imitating the themes and styles of the muralists; but the taste of the age went against them, and slowly, as the fourth century advanced, pottery resigned itself to being more and more an industry, less and less an art.