[Illustration: Fig. 165.--Early Greek Aryballoi. Egypto-Phoenician Style. (Trumbull-Prime Coll., N. Y. Metrop. Museum.)]
Were we to be guided solely by continuity in point of time and the succession of ideas, our next subject would be the art of Spain and Italy. We turn, in preference, to that of Greece. It claims the precedence due to priority of date. It holds also a position of what might be called isolation. Its general character has been indicated in the Introduction. The severity and simplicity of the taste of the Greek, and his indifference to effects in color, while permitting him to receive suggestions from Egypt and the East, led him to disregard those adjuncts of art which they held in highest esteem. To him beauty of form was everything, color little or nothing. The former he brought to such perfection that no advance has been made beyond the point he reached. Greek form embodies all that can be said of grace and proportion. We may imitate, but we can hardly hope to excel, what Greece accomplished in her early bloom. We may find prototypes in Egypt for some of her vessels (Fig. 165), but still her art, the culmination of all that was best in preceding forms, is pre-eminently her own. We say this without disparagement to those who were her teachers. To Egypt, in particular, Greece turned, at a remote age, for instruction, and learned from Phoenicia and the other nations with which trade brought her into contact. In this connection the group (Fig. 166) of vases from Athens may be compared with the Phoenician from Cyprus. There are in the decoration the same geometrical designs, the same vertical concentric circles, the same animal figures which the Phoenicians drew from Assyria. But after making every allowance for suggestions from abroad, after conceding that Grecian art is the development of that which preceded it, and that it occupies a well-defined place in progressive history, we fail to find anywhere the equals of the best ceramic works of Greece.
[Illustration: Fig. 166.--Primitive Vessels, from Athens and Argos.]
Taking them as a whole, they are divisible into unbaked; terra-cotta, or burnt clay, without a glaze; and glazed. The Greeks employed unbaked clay for bricks, statues, and several kinds of decoration. The former were used for city walls and buildings. Terra-cotta was devoted to similar purposes. It is not improbable that we may yet return, to a very considerable extent, to the ancient employment of this material in architecture. The Greeks made use of it for pillars, roofs, paving, bricks, friezes, cornices, lamps, statues, flower-pots, and numberless domestic and sepulchral vessels and ornaments. Bricks do not appear to have been held in very high esteem in building, but the custom of roofing with terra-cotta tiles was widely prevalent and of great antiquity. These tiles were occasionally embellished with painted flowers, and designs in blue, red, and yellow. The terra-cotta figures vary in color from red to bright yellow, and are soft in texture and easily marked. Terra-cotta models were used in casting, and in the same material were made copies of statues, like those in plaster of Paris of our own time; and some painters were even accustomed to make terra-cotta models of the figures they afterward painted. Of the specimens which have come down to us a very great number consists of small statuettes of the gods.