1 Greeks of the significance of the body and its movements as a means of expression that constitutes the uniqueness of their contribution to the art of portraiture, as it differentiates their achievement in this field from that of all other races-the ancient Egyptians, for instance, who, great portraitists though they were, limited likeness to the face, and retained, down to the latest times of their history, a conventional presentment of the body. So far as we can tell, the Greek portrait-statue is of Ionian origin-one of the many gifts of Eastern to Western Greece. It would seem as if in the latter half of the sixth century B.C., at the time of the tyrants,' the art had been fostered in the small kingdoms and satrapies of Asia-Minor, where the two dominating Oriental models, the enthroned image of god or monarch, and the standing image of the worshipper, were interpreted anew by the gifted sculptors of Ionia. The earliest examples which we possess of this Græco-Ionian portraiture are the famous images in the British Museum known as the Branchidæ statues; and here we can at once detect the realistic spirit. These statues, which get their name from the priestly class that set them up, represent Græco-Asiatic rulers, intermingled with priests and priestesses, who are all shown seated in a rigid frontal pose. Lining as they did the last stretch of the Sacred Way from Panormus on the Latmic Gulf to the great temple of Apollo at Didyma, they have often been compared, in general character and effect, to the long avenues of Sphinxes that led up to the Egyptian temples. Sir Charles Newton, who brought the statues to England, went so far indeed as to suggest that they were the work of Greek artists who had been educated in Egypt.' This may be so, though the departure from Egyptian models is also manifest; every figure shows an effort on the part of its sculptor to differentiate it from its companion; and the inscription preserved on one of the male statues, I am Chares, son of Kleisis, ruler of Teichioussa,' is itself a proud and unmistakable assertion of individuality. This inscription alone makes it probable that portraiture was at first regarded as a privilege of rulers who, in the half-Oriental cities of Ionian Greece, did not scruple to ape the customs customs of the neighbouring monarchies of Assyria and Egypt. So audacious a step, as Lippold points out, would be out of the question at the period in any of the democratic cities of the mainland of Greece, where the notion of raising a man above his fellows by means of a portrait would have appeared at once intolerable and sacrilegious. The votive statues which excavations at Athens have yielded in large numbers, though often called images of the dedicators, adhere only to the design typical of the class to which the particular dedicator belonged; and none of the many inscriptions reveals any such assertion of individuality as the Chares of Branchidæ. Reasons religious and political thus combined with technical inexperience to keep back the expression of individuality. Not even the tyrants' of the cities of the mainland ventured, like the petty rulers of Ionia, to set up their own portraits. The lofty Ionian tradition was continued in such noble works as the fifth-century Heraclitus in the garb of one of the priestly Kings of Ephesus, a fine copy of which, lately recovered in Crete, is now in the Museum of Candia. We shall meet it again in the imposing statue of the Carian Mausolus, and in much of the portraiture of Alexander and his successors, whence it passed into the Imperial portraiture of Rome; and a careful study of medieval sculpture might reveal the Ionian spirit still active there. As is to be expected, the tendency to repress individual likeness makes itself doubly felt in the early efforts at female portraiture. Here the innovating spirit of Ionia did not avail. In amusing contrast to Chares' affirmation of himself is the unassuming inscription (now lost) that could once be read on the chair of one of the female figures from Branchida, who appears as spokeswoman for herself and her companions. The ladies modestly veil their personalities and are content to state that their images were dedicated en bloc by one Hermesianax. At Athens and elsewhere in Greece the numerous inscriptions show that the archaic Greek female statue was of a purely generic character; and, when dedicatedas was mostly the case-to a feminine divinity, it was intended, as often as not, as the image of the goddess rather than of the dedicatress. There are, in our Archaic Room, good examples both of the Kore and her male companion the Kouros, but they belong to another inquiry, and as portraiture need not detain us here. The tardy recognition of woman as a subject for genuine portraiture-the way in which she was pressed back into the ranks of the undistinguished crowd that had no right to effigies of themselves-remain as characteristic of Greek art as of Greek thought, and were in part no doubt the result of the Oriental seclusion in which Greek women were kept. It required all the importance given later to woman as consort and mother of monarchs, to focus attention upon her and to make her emerge as a subject of portraiture, first, somewhat tentatively, in the Alexandrine Kingdoms of the East, and afterwards in the distinguished female portraits of the Roman Empire. The desire to honour the great men who had been benefactors to the State, and to continue to enjoy their benefactions by securing through their images their continued presence among their fellow-townsmen, was to prove the most active of all factors in counterbalancing the fear of portraiture as raising the individual above his fellows. Outside Ionia the earliest honorary portraitstatues that have come down to us are those set up at Athens to Harmodius and Aristogeiton, known from the world-famous copy in the Museum at Naples. This stupendous conception enables us to penetrate at once to the very heart and spirit of Greek portraiture in its passionate striving to reveal its subject, not in the countenance only, but in the whole figure of the man. Of the head of the Aristogeiton the Museum possesses a fine replica, only lately identified, which has all the massive architectonic quality of an archaic work (No. 1603). But, like that of the Harmodius, it might belong to almost any male statue of the period; certainly there is nothing in the expression or features of either head to throw light upon the character of the leaders of one of the most mysterious conspiracies in all history. But the inexorable murderous movement of the bodies, the perfect unity of the action, the sureness of the movement, all combine in such a feat of grouping and of portraiture as was rarely again attempted or achieved. We can well believe that the noble group inspired Carducci's description of the forms of terror that haunted the doomed Marat: " Marat vede nell' aria oscure forme Even in the Naples replica, which is not without many of the faults common to most copies, we are struck by the beauty and precision of the single rhythm that animates the two bodies and unites them in a bond closer and more eloquent than could be imparted by the conventional hand-clasp or other attitudinising common in later groups. It is curious to find the 'Harmodius and Aristogeiton' overlooked as portraiture. It can indeed be objected that the group is the representation of a deed, the commemoration of an act in which two individuals were indissolubly united, rather than a portrait of the two friends. But this is precisely what bestows upon it its compelling character as portraiture; the two men are portrayed in the act which, of all others, brought out and summed up the character of eachpresented it raised, so to speak, to its highest power. With this group the critical turning-point in the history of portraiture has been successfully passed. Future portraitists, though not called upon to combine action with likeness, and preferring as a rule emotion at rest to emotion in movement, were to realise that the static condition must contain the dynamic, and that rest must imply action; that a portrait, to be of any effect, must convey all the potentialities of the model's character. The Harmodius and Aristogeiton' brings us straight into the period of the Persian Wars. This was for Athens a time of quickening. The consciousness of national life of the aims of a free Greece as opposed to a tyrant-ridden Persia (as the Greeks conceived it)—was bound to open out new opportunities for portraiture. Because Athens now became, like Rome in later centuries, a centre of attraction to the best intellects of the world, we know Greek art and history chiefly through her eyes; and, for the two centuries of her artistic supremacy, portraiture can best be studied among the effigies which she put up to her great men, or to those whom her renown drew within her walls. At first the great men who were thus honoured were almost exclusively the military makers of the Athenian Empire. Here again the Athenian State-at once Vol. 234.-No. 464. с conservative and democratic-proceeded with singular caution. The essentially Greek fear of hubris or boastfulness led to devoting a tenth of the spoils to the erection of monuments commemorating the divine aid bestowed on Hellas at her need; but, by the side of the gods, sole givers of victory, a place was now reserved for the mortal leaders who had been their instruments in its achievement. In the group at Delphi erected from the spoils of Marathon a portrait of Miltiades stood side by side with the gods and heroes of Attica, the first instance of a contemporary figure associated with divine beings in a national monument. Later, again, statues of Miltiades and Themistocles were placed in the Prytaneum; and by degrees most of the prominent figures who had helped to make Athens were similarly honoured. A number of heads belonging to statues of Attic strategoi have been recovered; but in the earlier of these works at least there is little question of portraits in our sense of the word. The features are typical rather than realistic; and, even so late as the second half of the fifth century, we can trace few attempts to reproduce individual features. The earliest identified portrait of a military leader is the Pericles' of the sculptor Cresilas, probably set up on the Acropolis of Athens about 437 B.C. Of the various copies of the head, the one in our Museum, never having been broken from its herm, is certainly the most instructive; besides preserving the correct turn of the neck, it has the slightly open mouth and uplifted gaze of the original (No. 549). We would give much to know the whole statue, for the head is by far the most realistic portrait of any that have survived from the fifth century. In the melancholy that overcasts the beautiful face of Pericles-at once the central figure of the city's greatest period, and the man who fatally prepared her downfallwe may detect signs of the change that was soon to come over Athens. It is curious to read of fifth-century Athens, of the pride taken in her by her statesmen and her people, and to realise that, of those who contributed to her greatness, few besides military leaders were honoured by the State with personal effigies. Portraits other than those of great captains stand out as exceptions; the Anakreon 'singing in his cups,' for instance, known from the complete copy at Ny Carlsberg, though |