HKB
have said, inclined to genre, to luxurious representations of the amours of the gods or the adventures of heroes, with backgrounds of pastoral landscape. Shepherds fluted while Perseus slew Medusa.
The old order of things in Greece had been precisely the opposite of this Alexandrian manner. Homer and the later Homeric legends, with the tragedians, inspired the sculptors, and even the artisans who decorated vases. When a new order of subjects became fashionable, and when every rich Alexandrian had pictures or frescoes on his walls, it appears that the painters took the lead, that the initiative in art was theirs. The Alexandrian pictures perished long ago, but the relics of Alexandrian style which remain in the buried cities of Campania, in Pompeii especially, bear testimony to the taste of the period. {0h} Out of nearly two thousand Pompeian pictures, it is calculated that some fourteen hundred (roughly speaking) are mythological in subject. The loves of the gods are repeated in scores of designs, and these designs closely correspond to the mythological poems of Theocritus and his younger contemporaries Bion and Moschus. Take as an example the adventure of Europa: Lord Tennyson’s lines, in The Palace of Art are intended to describe picture—
‘Or sweet Europa’s mantle blew unclasp’d, From off her shoulder backward borne: From one hand droop’d a crocus: one hand grasp’d The mild bull’s golden horn.’
The words of Moschus also seem as if they might have derived their inspiration from a painting, the touches are so minute, and so picturesque—
‘Meanwhile Europa, riding on the back of the divine bull, with one hand clasped the beast’s great horn, and with the other caught up her garment’s purple fold, lest it might trail and be drenched in the hoar sea’s infinite spray. And her deep robe was blown out in the wind, like the sail of a ship, and lightly ever it wafted the maiden onward.’
Now every single ‘motive’ of this description,—Europa with one hand holding the bull’s horn, with the other lifting her dress, the wind puffing out her shawl like a sail, is repeated in the Pompeian wall-pictures, which themselves are believed to be derived from Alexandrian originals. There are more curious coincidences than this. In the sixth idyl of Theocritus, Damoetas makes the Cyclops say that Galatea ‘will send him many a messenger.’ The mere idea of describing the monstrous cannibal Polyphemus in love, is artificial and Alexandrian. But who were the ‘messengers’ of the sea-nymph Galatea? A Pompeian picture illustrates the point, by representing a little Love riding up to the shore on the back of a dolphin, with a letter in his hand for Polyphemus. Greek art in Egypt suffered from an Egyptian plague of Loves. Loves flutter through the Pompeian pictures as they do through the poems of Moschus and Bion. They are carried about in cages, for sale, like birds. They are caught in bird-traps. They don the lion-skin of Heracles. They flutter about baskets laden with roses; round rosy Loves, like the cupids of Boucher. They are not akin to ‘the grievous Love,’ the mighty wrestler who threw Daphnis a fall, in the first idyl of Theocritus. They are ‘the children that flit overhead, the little Loves, like the young nightingales upon the budding trees,’ which flit round the dead Adonis in the fifteenth idyl. They are the birds that shun the boy fowler, in Bion’s poem, and perch uncalled (as in a bronze in the Uffizi) on the grown man. In one or other of the sixteen Pompeian pictures of Venus and Adonis, the Loves are breaking their bows and arrows for grief, as in the hymn of Bion.