and of all the countries of Asia Minor, differ little from the monuments
of Greece proper.
The type of the Sicilians and of the Italiots is somewhat more
diverse ; principally characterized by the full and round chin of the
Fig- 48. Fig. 49.
L y c ia n C h i l d . Lïcaonian S oldier.
females, as seen in the following wood-cut [50] of Proserpina, taken
from an intaglio in eornelian, which belongs to my collection. We
50 sometimes find the same peculiar chin even
now among the females of Calabria and
Sicily, but especially on the island of Ischia,
where, according to a tradition, the Greek
blood of its inhabitants was scarcely mixed
by foreign intermarriages.
One feature, sufficiently explained by the
institutions of Greece, is common to all
these monuments of Hellenic art, v iz : the
absence of portraits,—individuality being
merged into the glorification of the human
)' f°rm by a Purely ideal treatment. Just as
in life the idea of the State absorbed the
interests and even the rights of the individual, so individuality was
ignored in the art of Greece; we never meet with portraits during
all the time of Greek independence; for even the representations
meant to be portraits were ideal. A l c ib ia d e s , according to Clemens
Alexandrinus,177 became a Mercury, and P e ricl es looked a demigod.
A rock-relief on a tomb in Lycia, at Cadyanda, the cast of which is
177 Admonit. adversus g entes, p. 35.
now in the British Museum, 178 inscribed with the historical names of
Secatomnos, Mesos, SesJcos, ¿•c., contains no portrait, but only ideal
figures. The Crcesus of the magnificent vase of the Louvre might
be taken for a Jupiter, were it not designated by the name. It was
not before the time of Alexander the Macedonian that real portraits
began to be made. Lysistratus, brother of the great sculptor Lysippus,
was in Greece the first who made a plaster-cast of the face of living
persons, and who, according to Pliny,179 made reablikenesses, whilst
his predecessors had tried to make them rather beautiful than faithful.
Pliny’s testimony is fully borne out by the remaining monuments
of art belonging to the period of Alexander: they show during
the life of the great king some marked attempts at individuality,
though idealism is not yet excluded from the portrait. The head of
the conqueron of Persia, on his own coins, is scarcely distinguishable
from the type of his mythic ancestor Hercules. Under his successor,
Lysimaehus, the portrait of Alexander on the Macedonian coins is by
far more individual. The beautiful bust of Demosthenes180 [51] in the
Vatican, though it be the work of a later age, is certainly a copy of
a bust contemporaneous with the last great citizen of Greece. It
exhibits the peculiar features.- and lisping mouth of the_ eloquent
unfortunate patriot; still, the upper part of theyhead is undoubtedly
ideal. A classical cornelian in my collection, with the intaglio head
of Demetrius Poliorcetqs [52], shows the efforts of some artists of the
Fig. 61* Fig. 52.
Demosthenes. Demetrius P oliorcetes, (PulszTcy coll.)
Macedonian period to blend idealism with individualism. This
king’s heroic beauty made the task easier; but as, in those times,
a portrait always implied a kind of-apotheosis, a bull’s horn was
178 Synopsis of the British Muséum, Lycian Room, Nos. 150-152.
179 XXX.Y, 44. 189 Visconti, Iconographie grecque, Pl. 29, fig. 2.