Gardner, Ernest Arthur: Poet and artist in Greece (London: Duckworth, 1933)

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POET AND ARTIST IN GREECE

were present at the action portrayed. He has not, how-
ever, in this case any opportunity of telling what went
before or what followed after. A favourite device of early
art is therefore what is called the continuous method. In
this, a figure or figures are repeated several times in the
same picture, in successive stages of action or movement.


A good example is offered in a mediaeval manuscript of
Genesis quoted by Wickhoff. Here the fall of Adam is
represented by three scenes, all set in a continuous
landscape. In the first, Adam and Eve stand by the tree
and take the apples, in the second they are covering their
nakedness with fig-leaves, and, in the third, they are
hiding in the bushes from the presence of God, indicated
by a hand in the sky. They are thus represented in three
successive positions, which must be separated by some
interval of time. If, instead of this, a number of quickly
succeeding positions were represented, we should have an
effect now familiar to us in the cinematograph. But even
the slower sequence is eminently suitable for representing