Studies of Travel: GreeceFreeman, Edward A. (Edward Augustus)
History
Studies of Travel: Greece
Freeman, Edward A. (Edward Augustus)
Greece -- Description and travel
We enter. It needs some effort of faith to believe that this roof, so
cunningly put together of stones which have all but reached the secret
of the true cupola, was once covered with brazen plates--that we are,
in fact, in what once was one of the brazen chambers of which the
poets tell us. From one point of view we may be glad that they are
gone, as otherwise we could not so well have studied this wonderful
construction. It is as marked a moment in a course of constructive
study when we stand in the treasury of Mykênê as when we stand in the
peristyle of Spalato. Each marks a great step in the history of art. In
one we see how nearly men could come to the arched construction without
actually reaching it. In the other we see the perfect construction
applied for the first time to its highest artistic use. But Spalato
is the direct parent of all that came after it. Mykênê is the parent
of nothing. It surely points to some great revolution, some overthrow
of the more civilized people by the less civilized, that the art
of primæval Greece should have stopped where it did. In all these
early buildings we find the arched construction only not brought to
perfection. In the artistic architecture of historical Greece the arch,
or any approach to it, as an artistic feature, was utterly unknown.
At the outside, it is barely used here and there, in works which did
not claim to be works of art, where the merest constructive necessity
called for it.
To any one who is familiar with Irish remains the treasury of Mykênê
cannot fail to suggest New Grange. The essential construction of the
two works is the same. But here again the ever needful warning comes
in. All that the undoubted likeness really proves is that the same
stage of constructive skill was reached, in times perhaps far removed
from one another, in Ireland and in Peloponnêsos. It does not prove, it
does not even suggest, any nearer connexion than this. Otherwise, no
field could be more tempting for a mystic ethnologist. Were there not
Danaoi in Argolis? And was there not in Ireland also a people with a
name very like Danaoi, but which we will not attempt to spell without
an Irish library at hand?
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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