DOI Page / Citation link:
https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.61301#0208
174
STUDIES IN GREEK ART.
450 B.C. the struggle with mere technique, with the
material of art persisted, and issued in perfect mastery.
It would not be difficult, did space allow, to fill up the
picture in detail. Traditions are preserved us even
before 600 B.C. of successive stages of technical struggle,
of Dibutades of Corinth, who first made a portrait in clay;
Glaucus of Chios, who discovered the art of soldering
metal; Rhoikos and Theodorus of Samos, who invented
the great art of casting ; Melas of Chios, who first con-
tended with the difficulties of working in marble. We
learn of schools and families where art was traditional-
at Chios, Crete, Samos; at SEgina, Argos, Sparta, Sicyon;
and at Athens; and we have monumental remains,
scattered fragments of sculpture, from every part of the
Greek world, which by degrees we learn to associate
sometimes with an artist’s name, more often with what
we know of his school. Patiently to piece together this
fragmentary and scattered information is the work of the
archaeologist. For the art student it is enough to know
that though in every department of the decorative handi-
crafts—in spinning, weaving, embroidery, metal chasing,
carving and modelling, in all the conventionalities of
pattern-composition—Greece was saved from a long and
weary struggle by her contact with the east, yet in her
struggle to express the human figure, its organism, its pos-
tures, its emotions, she had to go through the long disci-
pline of effort with but little extraneous aid. This utter-
STUDIES IN GREEK ART.
450 B.C. the struggle with mere technique, with the
material of art persisted, and issued in perfect mastery.
It would not be difficult, did space allow, to fill up the
picture in detail. Traditions are preserved us even
before 600 B.C. of successive stages of technical struggle,
of Dibutades of Corinth, who first made a portrait in clay;
Glaucus of Chios, who discovered the art of soldering
metal; Rhoikos and Theodorus of Samos, who invented
the great art of casting ; Melas of Chios, who first con-
tended with the difficulties of working in marble. We
learn of schools and families where art was traditional-
at Chios, Crete, Samos; at SEgina, Argos, Sparta, Sicyon;
and at Athens; and we have monumental remains,
scattered fragments of sculpture, from every part of the
Greek world, which by degrees we learn to associate
sometimes with an artist’s name, more often with what
we know of his school. Patiently to piece together this
fragmentary and scattered information is the work of the
archaeologist. For the art student it is enough to know
that though in every department of the decorative handi-
crafts—in spinning, weaving, embroidery, metal chasing,
carving and modelling, in all the conventionalities of
pattern-composition—Greece was saved from a long and
weary struggle by her contact with the east, yet in her
struggle to express the human figure, its organism, its pos-
tures, its emotions, she had to go through the long disci-
pline of effort with but little extraneous aid. This utter-