Read Ebook: Joseph Pennell's Pictures in the Land of Temples Reproductions of a Series of Lithographs Made by Him in the Land of Temples March-June 1913 Together with Impressions and Notes by the Artist. by Pennell Joseph

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The production of idols and fantastic vases, animals and grotesques, must have been extensive, as so many of these have already been found; indicating that they must have been common in their day. Examples of this fantastic decoration and modeling are seen in Figs. 12 to 15--and in Fig. 14 is an approach to portraiture. In one is seen the double-bellied bottle, so much in use in China and Japan. The twin-bottles seen in Figs. 8 and 9 are good examples of a fancy which evidently pleased potter and people in those "good old Peruvian times."

The opening of the CESNOLA collections, at the New York Museum of Arts, shows us a vast number of early potteries which are as yet hardly classified or understood. Many of them bear marks of Assyrian or of Phoenician inspiration; and among them are rude vessels closely resembling those of Peru, and also many grotesque forms of vases and animals, such as mark the early attempts at Art in other nations. That collection should be examined by those who are interested in this subject.

The hand-book published by the Museum is full of condensed information, and should be carefully preserved.

This red Samian or Roman much resembles the polished red ware made to-day in Egypt--of which a collection was shown in the recent Philadelphia Exhibition, and this bore no varnish.

One thing remarked as to this Roman pottery is, that it is never decorated with designs or ornaments in one or more colors. The decoration is sometimes incised, but more often is in relief. This is curious, too, as those master-potters, the Greeks, used colors in their designs. These pieces are to be seen in the museums of Paris, London, and elsewhere. The example engraved is a cup on which the decoration is in relief, and the fillets and bands are carefully moulded on the potter's wheel.

Figs. 17 and 18 were found in excavations made in 1845 in the city of London, and are excellent examples of this pottery. They are now in the Museum of Geology at London.

Fig. 17 is a sort of vase, or perhaps a drinking-cup, and is ornamented with the head of an animal. It is described as of "a pale red with a darkish-brown varnish."

Fig. 18 is called the "Cup of Samos," resembling so much as it does the work made at Samos. While these pieces were found in the earth beneath the city of London, many others have been found elsewhere; and much is believed to have been made at the old Anglo-Roman town of Caistre, in England, where remains of many furnaces have been unearthed.

Roman pottery has been found on the banks of the Rhine, near Bonn, Coblentz, Mayence, in Baden, etc., etc.; in France, at Auvergne, and at other points.

This finer work is supposed to date about the first century of our era. It is classed by M. Demmin as being made at Arezzo, the ancient Aretium, in Tuscany.

The GERMAN potters also produced at a very early day large quantities of pottery, which has a character of its own. That it must have been very extensively made and used is evident from the many specimens exhumed in various parts of Germany; in such numbers, indeed, that the peasantry have a profound belief they are the work of the dwarfs, and that they sprout spontaneously like mushrooms, as I have said. The examples we present are more simple than most of the Roman work, and the decoration is more severe.

Pots, vases, and children's toys, are also found in tombs in various parts of Germany, some of which show decided marks of art.

In some of these are found the ashes of the dead, in others bones broken up, and so preserved.

UNGLAZED POTTERY.--THE GREEK VASE.

Palaces of Homer's Heroes.--The Ceramicus at Athens.--Egyptian Pottery.--Etruscan Tombs.--Good and Bad Vases.--Age of Vases.--Various Styles.--The Archaic Style.--The Fine Style.--Beauty a Birthright.--Aspasia's House.--Names of Vases.--The Cup of Arcesilaus.--Number of Extant Vases.--Their Uses.--The Greek Houses.--Greek Women.--Greek Men.--The Hetairai.--Etruscan Vases.

The GREEK VASE has come to be a synonym for beauty of form. Not that every Greek vase is perfect--by no means--but that the Greeks had come to feel and were able to express perfection of form in it as it had not been done before, and as it has not been better done since.

So much interest hangs around this expression of the potter's art, that we give more space to the subject than to many other branches of the art. Keeping this perfection in mind, the manner of life of those Greeks, out of which the Greek vase grew, becomes of value, and is indeed of most interest.

How did the Greeks live, and why was the Greek vase made?

That the finest houses or palaces of the chiefs of the Heroic or Homeric period were larger, and more marked by barbaric splendor, than were the dwellings of the great in the days of Pericles, is admitted.

We give from Mr. Bryant's translation of the Iliad a brief description of Hector's return to Troy from the battle-field:

"And now had Hector reached the Scean gates And beechen tree. Around him flocked the wives And daughters of the Trojans eagerly; Tidings of sons and brothers they required, And friends and husbands. He admonished all Duly to importune the gods in prayer, For woe he said was near to many a one."

He passed onward in search of Andromache:

"And then he came to Priam's noble hall, A palace built with graceful porticoes, And fifty chambers near each other walled With polished stone, the rooms of Priam's sons, And of their wives; and opposite to these Twelve chambers for his daughters, also near Each other; and with polished marble walls, The sleeping-rooms of Priam's sons-in-law And their unblemished consorts. There he met His gentle mother on her way to seek Her fairest child Laodice."

That the description is glorified, we need not doubt, for that is the province of poetry; and poor is the poet who does not see the beauty through the squalor, the sunshine through the cloud.

The Greek house of the time of Pericles was much smaller and less splendid than this.

The Egyptians honored their dead, the Greeks honored their dead, and the Romans honored their dead. Let them have our thanks; for, because of that, things of interest and beauty are left to us.

In their tombs have been found gold-work, jewels, manuscripts, vases: all of which tell their stories of the way men lived, how they worked, what they sought; all of which show us that man then was the same as man is now--if you pricked him he bled, if you tickled him he laughed. We are apt to think that the Past was ignorant, brutal, savage. Have we, boastful as we are, made porcelain better than the Chinese? Have we made vases more beautiful than the Greeks? Poetry more musical?

In the far past man was savage, brutal, ignorant; and there is in man still the latent tiger. In the civilization of which we boast, there exist in all great cities, side by side with luxury and splendor, poverty, wretchedness, squalor, brutality.

In this high time of ART lay the seeds of corruption and death. The Athenian Greek became critical, refined, weak, luxurious, corrupt, base; and then he went to decay. In some tombs opened in Italy, the body is found lying at length in the middle, and about it stand perfect vases, love-offerings of friends: were they once filled with perfumes upon which the spirit of the dead was wafted away? We place flowers in the graves of our lovely ones, and, beautiful as they are, they vanish with the dead. But the Greek vase remains to us after the lapse of two thousand years.

When the Greeks--how early--began to fashion their fine work is not surely known; but pottery of theirs exists dating as far back as 700 B. C. Behind them were the Assyrians and the Egyptians, both nations great in war and great in the arts of peace. The remains we have of both show the Egyptians to have been the masters, with whom began those arts which grew and bore fruit in Assyria and in Greece. But the art of the Egyptians seems never to have reached the lightness, the delicacy, the exquisite beauty of line, which yet glorify the fictile art of Greece. Older than the oldest writings of the Hebrews, older than Homer, is the potter's wheel; through all history it has been the friend and companion of man; its products are part of his daily life; and delicate, brittle as they are, they have proved more enduring than the Pyramids.

Nearly all the pieces of pottery found in Egypt belong to those things which went into the daily uses of life. Most of them are of common clay, with common forms, and rude finish; and they seem to have been of all shapes and designed for many purposes. Great casks, vases, pots for oil, for grain, for meats, for wines, for drugs, for lamps; children's marbles, checkers, toys, rings, amulets, bottles, etc., etc., are among the many things shaped by the potter in Egypt.

Of those things made for ornamental purposes, there still exist some vases which approach the simple beauty of the Greek; of which we give one as pictured by Wilkinson in his work upon the antiquities of Egypt.

The highly-ornamented bottle is another thing made purely for purposes of luxury, which Potiphar's wife used to hold her dainty perfumes--perfumes which, we may easily believe, would add to her dangerous charms. It is modeled from the African calabash, which was the first vessel used there for carrying water. Form and decoration are both perfect in this small bottle.

We add a figure of very ancient Egyptian pottery, an early example of the efforts of that people at the human figure in clay. It is made to serve the purposes of a vase, whether for religious uses or other we do not know .

The terra-cotta earthenware vases and cups of the Greek and Etruscan potters, by universal consent, have come to be accepted as the most beautiful and satisfactory. That they were thus perfect from the start, and always so, no one need maintain; but that from Greece and from many parts of it should have come such a vast number of vessels, nearly all of which are beyond criticism, is what no one can fully explain.

Whence came the inspiration, the perception of beauty, which made the ordinary potter an artist, no man can tell.

I have mentioned the tombs--that many of the finest Greek vases have been found in those of Italy, and particularly in the part once called Etruria. In Fig. 30 is shown one of these tombs discovered near Naples. In it may be seen the remains of the body, with vases of various shapes standing or hanging on the wall. Most of the vases found with the dead in Greece were buried in the soil, and are thus less perfect than those found in Italy.

Let us guard, too, against another chance for disappointment. Nearly all the best vases extant have lain for centuries underground; they have lost the freshness and fineness of their polish; their coloring is often defaced; they are, perhaps, scratched or chipped. Seeing these rather dilapidated examples of the fictile art with eyes of extravagant expectation, one may feel disappointment or disgust. But let him look on till he sees and feels the subtile springing lines which shot from the brain of the potter, and inspired his hand to shape the vase.

As to the age of the Greek vases there are some evidences. The Greek poet Pindar, who lived between 520 and 440 B. C., describes the amphorae, those painted vases which were given as prizes at the Panathenaic festivals , and they are spoken of by Aristophanes, Strabo, and others.

Many attempts have been made to classify the works of the Greek potters, and the result is of some value, though a considerable degree of vagueness must attach to such as cannot be fixed by any signature or by the subject. Demmin, Brongniart, Birch, and others, have attempted classifications. We give here a sketch of that of the last as, on the whole, the most simple and probable; the writer follows Gerhard:

To the first or Archaic period are attributed the vases with yellow ground, having brown and maroon figures, mostly hatchings, flowers, or rude representations of animals, such as the goat, the pig, the stork, etc., etc. Whenever the human figure appears on the vases of this period it is shorter and less graceful than that on later work.

The next period is likely to show the figures in yellow upon black ground; the designs here are more beautiful; the subjects are mythological, historical, and poetical, and the human figures often have the grace and beauty which mark the best period of Grecian art.

The Decadence is marked by coarser work, less purity of form, and grosser and clumsier designs.

The paste or clay at times approaches the hardness of "terra-cotta;" at others it is so soft as to be scratched with a knife, and is easily broken. Its color varies: the earlier or Archaic period is mostly of a pale lemon-color; the clay used at Athens and Melos was a pale red; and in the best period of Greece the color becomes a warm orange; while those found in Italy usually called Etruscan are always of a dull, rather pale, red. Upon these grounds figures were painted in black, brown, yellow, and red.

Perspective those true artists did not strive after. The Greeks sketched in their designs in clean lines, and colored them with flat color, touching the muscles and articulations here and there to bring out more fully the action; but to rival the painter upon his canvas, that was not attempted upon pottery. It seems desirable to give some notion, as well as can be done in black-and-white, of what the earlier vases were like; and we, therefore, transcribe here some examples given by Birch, which show, not only the style of the decoration, but the forms, of the Archaic period .

The animals shown are rude and clumsy, and are arranged in bands, which are sown with flower-shapes without order or meaning. The forms, too, of the pots themselves, especially the two largest, are wholly lacking in that fine, subtile grace which marks them during the time of the "Fine Style." That the Art of Greece was not born full-grown and perfect like the goddess Minerva is certain; but that it grew and grew fast to its perfectness in that most keen and cunning Greek brain is also certain.

The time of the "Fine Style" was the time of Pericles, of Aspasia, of AEschylus, of Phidias; the time when the most beautiful of the beautiful Greek temples was built on the Acropolis sacred to Minerva; when sculpture, painting, poetry, and architecture, reached their height; when the human form and the human face arrived at such a divine beauty as they had never reached since the days of paradise, and have not again reached. In this wonderful time the Greek vase was born into its perfect form.

We quote again as to the work upon the Fine style: "In this the figures are still red, and the black grounds are occasionally very dark and lustrous. The ornaments are in white, and so are the letters. The figures have lost that hardness which at first characterized them; the eyes are no longer represented oblique and in profile; the extremities are finished with greater care, the chin and nose are more rounded, and

have lost the extreme elongation of the earlier school. The limbs are fuller and thicker, the faces noble, the hair of the head and beard treated with greater breadth and mass, as in the style of the painter Zeuxis, who gave more flesh to his figures, in order to make them appear of greater breadth and more grandiose, adopting the ideas of Homer, who represents even his females of large proportions. The great charm of these designs is the beauty of the composition and the more perfect proportion of the figures. The head is oval, three-quarters of which are comprised from the chin to the ear, thus affording a guide to its proportions, which are far superior to those of the previous figures. The disproportionate shape of the limbs disappears, and the countenance assumes its natural form and expression. The folds of the drapery, too, are freer, and the attitudes have lost their ancient rigidity. The figures are generally large, and arranged in groups of two or three on each side, occupying about two-thirds of the height of the vase."

The design we have given to illustrate in some degree the "Fine Style" is the "Departure of Achilles" , taken from a vase in the Louvre.

In our modern time it has come to pass that men worship strength, power, words, gold, brass--everything but beauty. They care little to have beautiful things about them, less to be beautiful themselves, to create beautiful children, or to do beautiful work. And what is the result? Often they are as unlovely in their souls as in their persons; and so, while we boast of great cities, and long railways, and amazing cotton-mills, we boast not of beautiful men who make beautiful work. Perfection tends to perfection, and ugliness to ugliness. Therefore, let the perfect man and the perfect woman marry, that thus we may have the perfect race once more. To bring this to pass we must insist upon perfect form and perfect decoration in all things about us; we must know beauty and value it. One step to this great end is to study the Greek vase. The next step is to make every home a temple of art.

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