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process if we could be sure of the interpretation to be placed on a wall-painting discovered some years ago in a late Greek tomb at Kertch in the Crimea, the ancient Panticapæum, which has received less attention than it deserves from archæologists. Here we see a painter at work in his studio, on the walls of which hang finished portraits. He is in the act of heating an instrument which is very roughly rendered, but looks like a spoon seen in perspective; and beside him is his colour-box, with compartments for the several pigments. Such a colourbox is described by Varro as part of the stock-in-trade of the encaustic painter; and in a Roman villa discovered in 1842 at St Médard-des-prés, in La Vendée, there was found a set of painter's materials which included a colour-box and metal spoons with pointed handles. These must surely be the cauteria mentioned by ancient writers amongst the instruments of the encaustic painter; and their use may be illustrated by the Kertch fresco. If so, it would seem that the coloured wax was melted before application to the panel; and Donner von Richter's theory, according to which it was liquefied by mixture with oil, would lose its credit. On Plate IV three

examples of the portraits produced by this process are shown. They cannot, it is true, be ranked very high as works of art, but they are of no small interest, both as realistic portraits which illustrate for us the facial types of Greco-Roman Egypt, and as examples of the technique which held the place of modern oil-painting in ancient art.

As the art of painting declined under the Roman Empire, that of mosaic gained in importance; and its remains are of no small value to us in our study of ancient pictorial composition. The most famous, though not technically the most perfect, of ancient mosaics is that discovered in the house of the Faun at Pompeii, which represents the meeting of Alexander and Darius on the battlefield of Issus.* This undoubtedly reproduces, though not without some misunderstandings, a painting of the early Hellenistic age, possibly the Battle of Alexander and Darius' by Philoxenus of Eretria, of

* An attempt has recently been made to show that Arbela, not Issus, is the battle represented; but the proof is hardly conclusive.

which Pliny speaks; but, though it may reflect something of the verve of the original composition, it cannot enlighten us as to its purely pictorial qualities. In the second century of our era we find instances of the attempt to produce in mosaic, by a mere tour de force, the effects proper to painting; such may be seen in the celebrated mosaic of the doves from Hadrian's villa, now in the Capitoline Museum. But it was the builders of the later Empire who best understood the part which mosaic should play in decoration. With a scale of about thirty tints they attained monumental effects far surpassing those of the modern mosaicist, who employs a thousand in place of one; and they brought their stately figures into harmony with the lines of their architectural surroundings.

It has been observed by a recent critic that the radical distinction between Eastern and Western art is wrongly stated when it is said that the East prefers colour, the West form; and the foregoing account of ancient painting will have shown that the Greeks, whose solution of the problem of form was final, had also mastered the secrets of colour. But it is likewise true, as the same critic points out, that Western art is profoundly intellectual; and it can therefore be no matter for surprise that, when the intellectual movement of the Greco-Roman world came to its close, painting should have lost the ground gained through such ardent toil, ground whose reconquest was the work of the artists of the Renaissance.

H. STUART JONES.

Art. 7.-OVID AND SHAKESPEARE'S SONNETS.

1. Shakespeare's Sonnets: being a reproduction in facsimile of the First Edition of 1609. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1905.

2. P. Ovidii Nasonis Opera. Three vols. Edited by J. P. Postgate. London: Bell, 1898.

3. Shakespeare's Ovid: being Arthur Golding's translation of the Metamorphoses. Edited by W. H. D. Rouse, Litt.D. London: De La More Press, 1904.

4. Les Métamorphoses d'Ovide et leur modèles grecs. By Georges Lafaye. Paris: Alcan, 1904.

FOR full eighteen centuries the Metamorphoses led in the race among Ovid's works for popular favour. Probably the vogue waxed greatest from the thirteenth to the seventeenth century. For those four hundred years generation vied with generation in proofs of admiring interest. The highest honours were steadily accorded to this spacious storehouse of myth and poetry, alike by laity and clergy through medieval western and southern Europe. The book was translated not only into French and Italian, but also into German and medieval Greeklanguages then on the confines of culture. Separate

fables, like those of Narcissus or Orpheus, Pyramus or Philomela, grew popular everywhere in vernacular renderings into verse. Dante in his treatise on rhetoric ('De vulgari eloquentia ') applauded both the poetic diction of the Metamorphoses and its allegorical value. Of the many medieval moralisations of classical poetry over which Rabelais made merry, the most popular were two allegorical interpretations of Ovid's poem-one by Dante's disciple, Giovanni del Virgilio, the fourteenth century champion of scholarship, and the other by the French Dominican, Pierre Berçuire, who lived in friendly intercourse with Petrarch at Vaucluse. The Italian humanists of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, Politian and Bembo for example, accepted the Metamorphoses as a poetic model of indisputable primacy, and the prolific vernacular poets, Lodovico Dolce, the Venetian, and Clément Marot, the Norman, began new literal translations before the sixteenth century was far

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advanced. The French scholar printer, Stephanus, saluted the author of the Metamorphoses as the poet of painters.' Tintoretto and Titian sought in Ovid's pages inspiration for their brush. At the bidding of Francis I, Primaticcio and Rosso adorned the walls of the palace at Fontainebleau with scenes of Ovid's fables.

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Meanwhile the most artistic of the early printers and engravers of Paris, Venice, and Bologna applied their skill to fine editions of the book. At Paris the first impressions of text or paraphrase bore the significant title 'La Bible des Poètes,' for which was substituted in later issues the more sonorous designation Le Grand Olympe des histoires poétiques, du prince de poésie, Ovide Naso.' Both formulas bore witness to the vastness of the book's influence on contemporary literary effort. Tudor England shared the continental enthusiasm. Caxton turned the work into his own tongue so early as 1480. Near the opening of Queen Elizabeth's reign, two Englishmen, Thomas Peend and Arthur Golding, simultaneously and independently set to work on new translations into English verse. Peend withdrew from the competition in Golding's favour after publishing a single fable. Golding carried his enterprise through, and in 1567 he completed his publication of the fifteen books of the poem in English ballad metre. Golding's version held the field for half a century. During Shakespeare's lifetime seven editions enjoyed wide circulation; and, when the book's vogue was decaying, its place was filled by the rendering of George Sandys, whom Dryden described as 'the best versifyer of the former age.' Dryden himself was, at a later period, one of the most eminent hands' who laboured lovingly at the same oar. The Metamorphoses were acknowledged to be the poet's bible in seventeenth century London no less than in sixteenth century Paris.

Ovid's Metamorphoses appealed to readers of all ages. Boys delighted in its story-telling charm, while their seniors recognised its perfection of style and diction. Its usefulness as an educational manual was acknowledged universally from the medieval era downwards; and no school or college of western Europe in the sixteenth century excluded the work from its curriculum. Montaigne, who graphically presented the dominant literary sentiment of European youth in his epoch, describes in

the following words an experience which every contemporary of culture might have echoed :

'The first taste or feeling I had of books was of the pleasure I took in reading the fables of Ovid's Metamorphoses; for, being but seven or eight years old, I would steal and sequester myself from all other delights, only to read them; forsomuch as the tongue wherein they were written was to me natural; and it was the easiest book I knew; and, by reason of the matter therein contained, [it was] most agreeing with my young age.' ('Essays,' Bk. 1, cap. 25.)

The differences of nationality caused no variation in the affection which Ovid's Metamorphoses excited in the budding intellect of Renaissance Europe.

Shakespeare's familiarity with Ovid's Metamorphoses was in inevitable conformity with the spirit of his age. The Latin text was part of the curriculum of his grammar school education. Golding's English translation was universally accessible during his boyhood and manhood. There is no straining of the evidence in the assumption that, had Shakespeare left a record of the literary influences of his youth, he would have described a personal infatuation with the Metamorphoses no smaller than that to which Montaigne confesses in his autobiographical reminiscences. There is in the Bodleian Library an Aldine edition of the Latin poem which came out at Venice in 1502, and Shakespeare's initials are scribbled on the title-page. Whether these letters be genuine or no, a manuscript note of unquestioned authenticity states that the volume was believed, as early as 1682, to have been owned by Shakespeare. At any rate, no Renaissance poet's work offers fuller or clearer testimony than Shakespeare's of the abiding impression which the study of Ovid's Metamorphoses made on poetic genius.

Shakespeare's earliest play, 'Love's Labour's Lost,' introduces Ovid as the schoolboy's model for Latin verse (IV, ii, 127): 'Ovidius Naso was the man: and why, indeed, Naso, but for smelling out the odoriferous flowers of fancy, the jerks of invention?' Elsewhere Shakespeare jests familiarly with the unhappy fate of 'the most capricious poet, honest Ovid,' who died in exile among the barbarians (As You Like It,' III, iii, 8). In another early play, 'Titus Andronicus,' the book of Ovid's

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