Art, Greek; Greek drama -- History and criticism; Mythology, Greek
the potter, settled there. The record of [231] early inventions in
Greece is sometimes fondly coloured with human sentiment or incident.
It is on the butterfly wing of such an incident--the love-sick
daughter of the artist, who outlines on the wall the profile of her
lover as he sleeps in the lamplight, to keep by her in absence--that
the name of Butades the potter has come down to us. The father fills
up the outline, long preserved, it was believed, in the Nymphaeum at
Corinth, and hence the art of modelling from the life in clay. He
learns, further, a way of colouring his clay red, and fixes his masks
along the temple eaves.
The temple of Athene Chalcioecus--Athene of the brazen house--at
Sparta, the work of Gitiades, celebrated about this time as
architect, statuary, and poet; who made, besides the image in her
shrine, and besides other Dorian songs, a hymn to the goddess--was so
called from its crust or lining of bronze plates, setting forth, in
richly embossed imagery, various subjects of ancient legend. What
Pausanias, who saw it, describes, is like an elaborate development of
that method of covering the interiors of stone buildings with metal
plates, of which the "Treasury" at Mycenae is the earliest
historical, and the house of Alcinous the heroic, type. In the pages
of Pausanias, that glitter, "as of the moon or the sun," which
Ulysses stood still to wonder at, may still be felt. And on the
right hand of this "brazen house," he tells us, stood an [232] image
of Zeus, also of bronze, the most ancient of all images of bronze.
This had not been cast, nor wrought out of a single mass of metal,
but, the various parts having been finished separately (probably
beaten to shape with the hammer over a wooden mould), had been fitted
together with nails or rivets. That was the earliest method of
uniting the various parts of a work in metal--image, or vessel, or
breastplate--a method allowing of much dainty handling of the cunning
pins and rivets, and one which has its place still, in perfectly
accomplished metal-work, as in the equestrian statue of Bartolomeo
Coleoni, by Andrea Verrocchio, in the piazza of St. John and St. Paul
at Venice. In the British Museum there is a very early specimen of
it,--a large egg-shaped vessel, fitted together of several pieces,
the projecting pins or rivets, forming a sort of diadem round the
middle, being still sharp in form and heavily gilt. That method gave
place in time to a defter means of joining the parts together, with
more perfect unity and smoothness of surface, the art of soldering;
and the invention of this art--of soldering iron, in the first
instance--is coupled with the name of Glaucus of Chios, a name which,
in connexion with this and other devices for facilitating the
mechanical processes of art,--for perfecting artistic effect with
economy of labour--became proverbial, the "art of Glaucus" being
attributed to those who work well with rapidity and ease.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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