alone that Greece could be connected with it. We possess, indeed, some monuments in which this conformity appears striking at the first glance. There are some figures of bronze considered Etruscan, some terra-cottas found particularly in Sicily, and some compositions in bas-relief, either in stone or metal, or on earthern vases, also of Etruscan origin, which I shall speak of in the course of these lectures, and a great number of which are as yet unedited, not to speak of the primitive coins of some Greek nations; all monuments which present in the conformation of the features of the countenance, in the drawing and the motion of the forms of the body, an Egyptian physiognomy. But does it follow from this apparent or real connection, that Grecian art borrowed from Egyptian art the type of these figures? This is precisely the question at issue: the following are some considerations which may serve to solve it. Let us recollect that the Greeks at first knew, I shall not say as monuments of art, but as objects of worship, nothing but conical or cylindrical stones; let us further remark, that having arrived at the point we have seen they had reached, that is at the point when they gave to their idols the features and the forms, more or less imperfect, of human nature, they raised themselves by successive degrees, and by a continued progress, to the highest point of perfection to which imitation could attain. Can any one now say that between that state of infancy, during which they were not indebted to the Egyptians for anything, for they found everywhere at hand round or square stones without having recourse to Egypt, and that state of gradual perfection, when no more than at first they certainly borrowed nothing from the Egyptians, for there never was discovered anything in Egypt which could resemble a Greek figure, there was an intermediate state, a transitional period, during which the Greeks were taught by the Egyptians? Strictly speaking it is possible, and I do not deny that some isolated facts, some few monuments, may seem to favour this supposition. Some communication, always, indeed, rare and partial, may have taken place between Egypt and Greece; some processes of art, some peculiar modes of manufacture, at distant periods may have been imported from one to the other; and during the space of time when these communications took place, a certain conformity of style and workmanship between the productions of these two nations may have resulted. This is neither impossible nor unlikely;

but I affirm that the aggregate of facts, that the generality of monuments is infinitely more favourable to the contrary opinion-that Grecian art was developed on its own soil, and by its own resources, without any foreign influence, without any foreign assistance.

In fact, from the moment that the sacred type of the Divine images had been fixed in Greece, such as a number of monuments represent to us, this type, which in its origin was never in any way indebted to the influence of Egyptian art, for it had emanated entirely from the cylindrical form to which a head, feet and hands had been adjusted; this type, more or less modified by the successive essays of a national school, such as that of Dædalus and his successors, was always distinct from the representation of Egyptian art such as the Greeks knew it such as we know it, and when art gradually emancipating itself from the trammels of routine and from the bonds of superstition, departed from this consecrated type to seek in human nature another model, it is clear that Greece followed thence forward a path so different from Egypt that it could never afterwards have any connection with it.

If Pausanias appears to confound some idols wrought in the Egyptian style with those of the ancient Attic or Æginetan school, this solely proceeds from the extreme likeness which the productions of an art yet in its infancy bear to one another. This apparent identity proves nothing in fact but their common imperfection.

There was a time when the Greeks, ignorant of what the Egyptians did not know how, or did not wish to do, worked in an equally faulty and imperfect manner; this is a certainty. But it does not in any way follow from thence that one nation, in its real or systematical ignorance, was the teacher of the other; and still less that those who continued obstinately in always doing wrong, taught others to do better. It is as if any one asserted that modern painting, the work of time, taste and genius, was the fruit of the conventional forms and the rude models of the Byzantine school. The connection I have just pointed out furnishes us with the means of deciding in the most peremptory manner, in my opinion, the question which occupies us; and the parallel between the manner in which art arose and was developed in ancient Greece, and the manner in which the same art was awakened and flourished again in modern Europe, is sufficiently interesting in itself to

deserve our dwelling on it. It is well known that in the long and disastrous period of the middle ages, the arts were involved in the common decline of institutions, of manners, and literary pursuits. All perished, all was abolished, by degrees, of the ancient system of civilisation, before the new society had assumed a determinate form; but all the traditions of art were not lost with its genius. Conventionalism took the place of genius, and the habits of trade maintained themselves when the principles of taste declined more and more. Statues and paintings continued to be made for the necessities of religion, the only thing which had never been interrupted, no longer indeed with the taste and genius of the past age, but only with its instruments and processes. In a word, art continued always to be practised, though it was morally fallen. It was at Byzantium, which had become, from the time of Constantine, the seat of the new empire, and the refuge of ancient civilisation, that were principally preserved the ancient traditions of art, modified after the ideas of the new worship. Byzantium had always continued to belong to the Greeks, when the rest of the world had been inundated by barbarians. The processes, the customs of the Greeks with respect to art, were perpetuated there in almost the same manner as their language; and it is to this fortunate circumstance that the Greeks were, doubtless, indebted for the advantage of retaining in the midst of the universal barbarity and their own decline, the sceptre of taste, and the instruction of art. From thence arose the style called Byzantine, which became the common model of Europe, at a period when there was no longer any one in any country capable of seeing, observing, or deciphering nature. The new images that Christianity had created, the Eternal Father, Christ, the Virgin, the Apostles, the Saints, Angels, received in this system their features, their forms, their peculiar and characteristic costume. These types recognised everywhere, reproduced everywhere with that religious scrupulousness which is equally dependent on the sentiment of devotion and on the incapability of art, were everywhere executed by similar processes; and it was thus, that everything connected with the practice of art must have been maintained by tradition, by imitation, and by piety, principally in Italy, where barbarity had less sway, where religious worship always retained more pomp, where genius constantly struggled with greater success against oppression and ignorance. Thus can

be followed, almost without interruption, the history of painting in Italy, from the last period of the empire to that which has been called, the period of the revival of art, through the means of paintings, on the wall, and on wood, which still exist in many ancient churches, or of mosaics, which take their place by imitating them.

In all these paintings, as well as in those mosaics which are but a kind of counterfeit of them, executed from century to century by Greek artists, or those formed in the Greek school, the Byzantine type is invariably to be found, such as it had been fixed at a primitive period, such as has been produced in those Madonnas supposed to be by St. Luke, in which the veneration of the artist is so completely blended with the worship of the model and the veneration of the saint, that he would never doubtless have been allowed to depart from such a type, when even another image could have been conceived and realised. The same type exercised the same influence in Germany and in the Netherlands, where painting on wood, on glass, on the wall, and on parchment, was always assiduously cultivated, and this is the type which still reigned in all its authority, and consequently in all its imperfection, when the Florentine Cimabue attempted to emerge from the beaten track, and produced by this single trait of boldness so wonderful an effect on the mind of his compatriots. At that period he was proclaimed the restorer of art, and while placing his name at the head of the history of painting, he has been almost considered as the creator of this new art.

However Cimabue, while attempting to give his Madonna less conventional features, and a physiognomy less Byzantine, did but follow in the execution of his painting, the known practices of his age; his painting is not distinguished by any process peculiar to him, from that of his contemporaries, such as Giunta of Pisa and especially Guido of Siena. He was acquainted with no other processes of art than those which his age was acquainted with, which his masters had taught him, that is, the Byzantines; and, under this view, it would not be just to consider him as the restorer of art. But it is under a more important, a more elevated consideration, that the history of modern painting commences in reality with Cimabue. It is because he attempted to shake off the chains of conventionalism; because he discovered another model than the Byzantine, blindly followed hitherto; because, lastly, he gave, by a happy

innovation, the example of returning to nature, so long misunderstood, that Cimabue, the disciple of the Byzantines in every thing connected with the practice of the art, deserves to be considered as the head of the modern school. From this moment it is certain that art, emancipated by degrees from its Gothic trammels, advanced step by step, but always onward in this new path, until it reached the highest degree of perfection, which it attained to in Raphael; and he who has seen the Madonna of Cimabue in the Academy of Arts at Florence, and the walls of the Vatican, may be assured that he has seen, that he has touched the two extremes of progress.

In unfolding, as I have done, the history of the revival of art in Europe, I can say, that I have traced as faithfully as possible the path which it must have followed formerly in Greece. In the same manner that the Byzantine type, consecrated at once by time and devotion, opposed itself for a long time to the emancipation of art, commenced by Cimabue, brought to perfection by Raphael, the hieratic type, whether it was born in Greece, whether it had been imported from Egypt, reigned in the Greek school, for which it was indebted to its ancient and sacred origin, until that period when were attempted, at a period, and by hands we do not precisely know, the first essays at imitation. Daedalus and his age, hold, therefore, in the history of Greek art, the same place that Cimabue and his school occupy with certainty in the history of modern art. From the time of Dædalus, each step which Grecian art made in the path of imitation, removed it farther from Egyptian influence, as from the time of Cimabue each new production of modern art emancipated it more and more from Byzantine influence. In the same manner as those Italian republics, Florence, Siena, Pisa, Bologna, Ferrara, Padua, and Venice, which entered the lists in emulation of one another, and advanced with an almost equal step in this new and brilliant career, ancient Greece had its different states, and probably in the same order, its Giotto, its Fra. Angelico, its Mantegna, and its Perugino. In a word, everything is similar on one side and the other, in the origin, in the direction, and progress of art, until the moment when that art reached its highest point of perfection; and I think that Raphael had very little to make him envied by Apelles himself. But it is here, perhaps, that the likeness ceases, and the difference is, we must say, entirely to the advantage of Greece. Modern