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The Beginnings Of Greek Sculpture
by
[Footnote 5:
Empaestik derives from the verb empaio, “to strike in, stamp.” (Liddell and Scott.) ]
Even in the marvellous shield there are other and indirect notes of reality. In speaking of the shield of Achilles, I departed intentionally from the order in which the subjects of the relief are actually introduced in the Iliad, because, just then, I wished the reader to receive the full effect of the variety and elaborateness of the composition, as a representation or picture of the whole of ancient life embraced within the circumference of a shield. But in the order in which Homer actually describes those episodes he is following the method of a very practicable form of composition, and is throughout much closer than we might at first sight suppose to the ancient armourer’s proceedings. The shield is formed of five superimposed plates of different metals, each plate of smaller diameter than the one immediately below it, their flat margins showing thus as four concentric stripes or rings of metal, around a sort of boss in the centre, five metals thick, and the outermost circle or ring being the thinnest. To this arrangement the order of Homer’s description corresponds. The earth and the heavenly bodies are upon this boss in the centre, like a little distant heaven hung above the broad world, and from this Homer works out, round and round, to the river Oceanus, which forms the border of the whole; the subjects answering to, or supporting each other, in a sort of heraldic order–the city at peace set over against the city besieged- -spring, summer, and autumn balancing each other–quite congruously with a certain heraldic turn common in contemporary Assyrian art, which delights in this sort of conventional spacing out of its various subjects, and especially with some extant metal chargers of Assyrian work, which, like some of the earliest Greek vases with their painted plants and flowers conventionally arranged, illustrate in their humble measure such heraldic grouping.
The description of the shield of Hercules, attributed to Hesiod, is probably an imitation of Homer, and, notwithstanding some fine mythological impersonations which it contains, an imitation less admirable than the original. Of painting there are in Homer no certain indications, and it is consistent with the later date of the imitator that we may perhaps discern in his composition a sign that what he had actually seen was a painted shield, in the pre-dominance in it, as compared with the Homeric description, of effects of colour over effects of form; Homer delighting in ingenious devices for fastening the metal, and the supposed Hesiod rather in what seem like triumphs of heraldic colouring; though the latter also delights in effects of mingled metals, of mingled gold and silver especially– silver figures with dresses of gold, silver centaurs with pine-trees of gold for staves in their hands. Still, like the shield of Achilles, this too we must conceive as formed of concentric plates of metal; and here again that spacing is still more elaborately carried out, narrower intermediate rings being apparently introduced between the broader ones, with figures in rapid, horizontal, unbroken motion, carrying the eye right round the shield, in contrast with the repose of the downward or inward movement of the subjects which divide the larger spaces; here too with certain analogies in the rows of animals to the designs on the earliest vases.
In Hesiod then, as in Homer, there are undesigned notes of correspondence between the partly mythical ornaments imaginatively enlarged of the heroic age, and a world of actual handicrafts. In the shield of Hercules another marvellous detail is added in the image of Perseus, very daintily described as hovering in some wonderful way, as if really borne up by wings, above the surface. And that curious, haunting sense of magic in art, which comes out over and over again in Homer–in the golden maids, for instance, who assist Hephaestus in his work, and similar details which seem at first sight to destroy the credibility of the whole picture, and make of it a mere wonder-land–is itself also, rightly understood, a testimony to a real excellence in the art of Homer’s time. It is sometimes said that works of art held to be miraculous are always of an inferior kind; but at least it was not among those who thought them inferior that the belief in their miraculous power began. If the golden images move like living creatures, and the armour of Achilles, so wonderfully made, lifts him like wings, this again is because the imagination of Homer is really under the stimulus of delightful artistic objects actually seen. Only those to whom such artistic objects manifest themselves through real and powerful impressions of their wonderful qualities, can invest them with properties magical or miraculous.