II. PAINTING

Painting is usually the last great art to mature in a civilization; in the early stages of a culture it is subordinated to religious architecture and statuary, and it acquires independence only when private life and private wealth invite the decoration of the home or the commemoration of a name. The death of democracy having weakened the sense of the state, the individual returned to domestic consolations. Rich men built themselves palatial residences, and gave high fees to artists who could adorn a fountain or brighten a wall. Alexandria used painting on glass as one form of mural ornament; all Hellenistic cities employed for this purpose movable panels of wood; princes and magnates preferred to have immense pictures painted on detachable marble slabs. Pausanias describes a prodigious number of paintings seen by him in his tour of Greece, but nothing of this flourishing art has cheated time except some faded tints on pottery or stone. We are left to guess at its quality from the pale and middling copies found at Pompeii, Herculaneum, and Rome.

Greece continued to rank its painters as high as its sculptors and architects, perhaps higher. It paid them American commissions, and told a thousand fond stories about their lives. Ctesicles of Ephesus, failing to receive a desired boon from Queen Stratonice, painted her romping with a fisherman, exhibited the picture, and then took ship to safety; Stratonice, because “the likenesses of the two figures were so admirably expressed,” forgave him and let him, return.⁸ When Aratus took Sicyon he ordered all portraits of its past dictators destroyed; one dictator, Archestratus, had been shown by Melanthus (a fourth-century painter) beside his chariot, and so vividly that the artist Neacles entreated Aratus to spare the picture; Aratus consented, on condition that the figure of Archestratus be replaced by some less offensive form.⁹ Protogenes, says Strabo, painted a satyr with a partridge so realistically that live partridges called to it; the painter finally blotted out the bird so that people might appreciate the excellence of his satyr.¹⁰ The same artist, Pliny tells us, applied four coats of paint to his most famous picture, lalysus (supposed founder of the town of that name in Rhodes), so that when time wore out the uppermost layer the colors might still be fresh and clear. Vexed by his inability to represent with sufficient verisimilitude the foam that dripped from the mouth of lalysus* dog, Protogenes lost his temper and hurled a sponge at the picture, willing to destroy it; the sponge, of course, struck just at the right place, and, when it fell, left a blotch of color marvelously like the foam of a panting hound. When Demetrius Poliorcetes besieged Rhodes he refrained from setting fire to the town lest this painting be destroyed. During the siege Protogenes continued at work in his village studio, in the direct line of the Macedonian advance. Demetrius sent for him and asked why he had not, like the other villagers, taken refuge within the city walls. “Because I know,” answered Protogenes, “that you are waging war with the Rhodians, and not with the arts.” The King assigned a guard to protect him, and neglected the siege to watch the artist work.¹¹

Hellenistic painters knew the tricks of perspective, foreshortening, lighting, and grouping. Though they used landscapes only as background and decoration, and rendered them (if we may judge from the Pompeian copies) in a lifeless and conventional way, they at least realized the existence of nature, and brought it into art at the same time that Theocritus was importing it into poetry. But they were so interested in man and all his works that they had little time for trees and flowers. Their predecessors had painted only the gods and the rich; the Hellenistic artists were fascinated by anything human, and discovered that an ugly subject might make a beautiful painting, or at least a handsome fee. They turned to common life with a Dutch zest, and delighted in picturing barbers, cobblers, prostitutes, seamstresses, donkeys, deformed men, or peculiar animals. To these genre pictures they added representations of still life—cakes and eggs, fruit and vegetables, fish and game, wine and all the paraphernalia of its ancient ritual. Sosus of Pergamum amused his contemporaries by imitating, in a deceptively realistic floor mosaic, an unswept floor still littered with the leavings of a feast.¹² The sedate were scandalized, and denounced these glorifiers of common things as pornographoi andrhyparographoi—portrayers of obscenity and filth. In Thebes the representation of ugly objects was forbidden by law.¹³

Certain larger masterpieces of the age were rescued not from anonymity but from oblivion by the lava of Vesuvius. A fresco found at Ostia is apparently a weak copy of a Hellenistic original; we know it as The Aldobrandini Wedding from the Italian family to which it belonged before it found a place in the Vatican. Aphrodite, Rubensianly robust, warms up the courage of the timid bride while the bridegroom, needing no prodding, waits impatiently beside the couch; finer than these central personages is a graceful woman playing some hymeneal strain on a faded lute. A Pompeian mural, traced uncertainly to a third-century Greek original, shows Achilles, with Patroclus beside him, angrily surrendering Briseis to Agamemnon’s lust. The figures in these paintings seem to our wont and taste more ample than beautiful; we are accustomed to less body and longer legs; but it must be conceded that ancient artists knew Greek men and women better than we shall ever know them. Time has taken the bloom from these works; only an act of historical imagination can restore the brilliance and freshness that doubtless were once the admiration of multitudes and kings.

More impressive are certain Roman mosaics that have apparently been derived from Hellenistic paintings. Mosaic was an old art in Egypt and Mesopotamia; the Greeks took it over, and lifted it to the peak of its history. A painting was divided by lines into little squares, and tiny cubes of marble were so colored that when put together they reproduced the picture in a form surprisingly durable; several mosaics, though trodden by innumerable feet through many centuries, still retain their color and tell their ancient tale.The Battle of Issus, found in the House of the Faun at Pompeii, and dubiously connected with a fourth-century Greek painting by Philoxenus,* is composed of approximately 1,500,000 stones, each some two or three millimeters square, the whole mosaic measuring eight by sixteen feet. It was badly injured by the earthquake and eruption that overwhelmed Pompeii in A.D. 79, but enough remains to attest the skill and vigor of the work. Alexander, black and disheveled with the heat and filth of war, is leading the attack, and has ridden his Bucephalus to within a few feet of the chariot that carries Darius. A Persian grandee has flung himself between the kings, and has received Alexander’s lance in his body. Darius, ignoring his own danger—for the conqueror’s next lance is aimed at him—leans from his chariot towards his fallen friend, his face full of anxiety and grief. Persian cavalrymen rush up to rescue their ruler, and Alexander’s weapon stays poised in the air. The representation of complex emotions in Darius’ face is the outstanding accomplishment of the work; but the most attractive head in the composition is that of Alexander’s horse. There is no greater mosaic than this.