Since Greece has been free, and its soil can be explored and excavated without excessive obstacles, each year, so to speak, brings us new insights into Greek art and its history. This is a study that must be rebuilt from the ground up. The questions that seemed simplest, and which were settled with a stroke of a pen fifty or sixty years ago, have become more complex and numerous as unexpected documents emerge from the earth.
It is primarily sculpture and the decorative aspects of architecture that are affected by this work of discovery; painting is barely involved. We must mourn its loss, much as we have for ancient music. There is no chance of discovering a truly Greek Pompeii or Herculaneum from the great era. Consequently, we will probably never have much more light shed on the art and masterpieces of Polygnotus and Apelles than we do now. Statuary and ornamental sculpture, on the other hand, thanks to the durability of their materials, can resist the effects of time and survive, at least in mutilated fragments, buried under soil and rubble. There is, therefore, help to be expected from this quarter.
Without aspiring to anything as grand and memorable as the Elgin marbles, as complete as the pediments of Aegina, or flattering ourselves that we will often encounter a Venus de Milo, a Marathon warrior, or an Eleusis bas-relief, we can still find unforeseen data and truly new clarifications. These may concern the origins and early periods of great Hellenic art, the diversity of its characteristics, or its true chronology. And it is not only in Greece itself, in the Archipelago, and on the coasts of Asia Minor that this kind of knowledge is emerging, but also in the very heart of the Asian continent.
As Assyrian and Persepolitan art are unearthed—with their bizarre mixtures of technical skill and blind routine, of learned imitation and barbaric imagination—we realize they are linked to Greek art by relationships no one had previously suspected. In 1818, when Quatremère de Quincy cast his first glance at the authentic remains of the Parthenon sculptures, he wrote from London to Canova with a touching sincerity that everything, both in the history and the theory of Greek art, had to be redone. What would he say today? How many obscure points there are to clarify, how many gaps to fill! It may take fifty years, and fifty years of fortunate discoveries, before we are in a position to write pertinently on this old and admirable subject. In the meantime, the role of our era is to search with ardor and to record facts and evidence with patience, without generalizing too soon or rushing to conclusions.
The Lenormant Mission to Eleusis
Anything that tends to shorten this new kind of initiation into the mysteries of Greek art should be welcomed with gratitude. We therefore applaud the mission given last year to a young archaeologist, M. François Lenormant. This mission was intended first to continue the excavations at Eleusis, so successfully begun by his father and inaugurated, as is well known, by the discovery of a masterpiece. Its second purpose was to bring back to France plaster casts of any sculptures found in these new excavations, as well as of other monuments still unknown in Paris.
We will speak here only briefly of the results of the excavations, leaving it to the young explorer himself to determine, with the precision and detail such a subject requires, the character and extent of the substructures he uncovered. What we can say, based on our own judgment, is that the casts he brought back, which have been on display for some time at the École des Beaux-Arts, are worthy of careful and curious examination. It is a well-chosen collection, useful to both art and the history of art. You will not find a pearl as fine and rare as the Triptolemus between the Two Goddesses, but even without reaching that exquisite distinction, there is more than one marble here that merits attentive study and from which new lessons can be drawn. We will now point out those that most interested us.