Phidias as being the first who had given this art its full development *, and he adds that it was carried to its point of perfection by Polycletus. Pliny mentions the four great departments of the art of sculpture as if they existed contemporaneously; and seeing that from the highest antiquity the art of fashioning earth, and wood, and stone, and metals, existed in some shape or other, he was unable to discover a real priority in those divisions of art whose origin was equally lost in the obscurity of previous ages. The first statues were undoubtedly connected with religious worship; and the offerings which were constantly made in the temples of the Grecian mythology wêre in a great degree connected also with the labours of art. The ingenuity of man was called upon to add its value to the intrinsic worth of the metal upon which it worked. The temple of Delphi, which was pillaged five times, numbered amongst its choicest riches vases and tripods. The traditions of the poets ascribe the earliest metallic works to Vulcan, and all the objects of sculpture mentioned by Homer were works in metal. The sacred historian, also, speaks of Tubal Cain as "an instructor of every artificer in brass and iron." The domestic habits of the Greeks were calculated, as much as their religion, to call forth that species of art which was associated with the sculpture of metals. Anacreon suggests to a workman the designs which he wishes to have engraved on his silver vases; and Athenæus counts sixty-six forms of cups which were employed at table. Cicero recites

the number and beauty of the vases which were used in Sicilythe patella, the patera, the thuribulum, —all made with the greatest skill and of antiqué fashions, and common in every house whose owner was in easy circumstances. There was doubtless, *Primusque artem torenticen aperuisse atque demonstrasse merito judicatur. Lib. xxxiv. cap. 8.

therefore, a very considerable commerce in these articles throughout the ancient world; and the Toreuticians constituted a class of the highest importance to the luxury of private life and the magnificence of public worship. Phidias, who appears to have practised this art as a profession, and to have carried to it a combination of talent rarely united in one individual, gave it its highest development when he adapted its processes to the execution of those colossal works which we have described. His genius probably stood in the same relation to ancient art as that of Michael Angelo to modern. They were each as links between one age and another,—and each, possessing an astonishing capacity for the ideal and the practical, reduced the abstractions of the imagination to an alliance with the tastes of established custom. Although Phidias was a statuary in bronze, a sculptor in marble, and a painter in his youth, his reputation principally depends upon those colossal statues composed of assemblages of ivory and gold, and all their accessories, such as thrones and pedestals, which were produced by his skill in the art known as the Toreutic. A passage in Seneca points out this distinguishing characteristic of his fame: "Phidias not only knew how to make images in ivory, but he made them of brass *." It is difficult to understand how the habit of employing his talent upon works in which ornament was the distinguishing character, could have permitted the genius of this great sculptor to produce a statue possessing the severe grandeur of the Theseus, whose remains are existing in our Museum. But it is still more difficult for us, bred up in entirely different notions of taste, to understand how the minute labour of the chaser and the inlayer, applied to colossal figures, such as the Jupiter or Minerva, could have rendered the * Epist. 85.

general effect, the idea of the art, triumphant over its details, and have united the most perfect purity of taste with the greatest splendour of materials. Yet that such was the effect of these statues and their accompaniments, there can be no reasonable doubt; and the difference between our habits of thinking and those of the ancients in this particular, agreeing as we do in our estimate of marble statuary, is probably to be referred to the consideration that our taste in sculpture is essentially imitative, and that being formed upon the models of Grecian art which time has spared to us, it is incapable of arriving at a right judgment of those productions of a different order of excellence, of which no model remains.

A portion of Mons. Quatremère de Quincy's book is devoted to a demonstration of the mechanical proceedings in the construction of statues of ivory, or of ivory and gold. These details are exceedingly interesting, both to the artist and to the mechanic. His theory is founded upon a consideration of the form of the elephant's tusk, partly hollow and partly solid,— upon the assumption that the ancients were able to obtain tusks of larger dimensions than those ordinarily seen at the present day,-that an art existed of rendering the cylindrical part of the tusk flat when cut through longitudinally,-and that plates might thus be procured from six to twenty four inches wide. He then conceives that a block of wood having been fashioned as a sort of core for the ivory, the individual plates were fixed upon it, having been cut and polished in exact resemblance to the corresponding portions of a model previously executed. The woodcuts on the next page exhibit the clay model, the separate pieces of ivory for a bust, and the block with a portion of the ivory plated on it.

The genius of Phidias, and the other great sculptors of ivory, called into life by the power and wealth of Greece at the period of the Persian war, had filled her temples with statues in which the material of elephant's tusks was employed with equal taste and prodigality. Even after the death of Alexander,

when sculpture had assumed an heroic rather than a sacred character, being consecrated to the actions of men rather than to the ideal attributes of gods, statues of gold and ivory were universal throughout Greece. In the Philippeum of Olympia were statues of Alexander and of his family, executed in gold and ivory. The incense of sculpture was particularly acceptable to the Macedonian conqueror; and his statues were spread through every country where his reputation had extended. The conquest of India necessarily increased the importation of ivory into Greece. The funeral monument of Hephæstion was adorned with statues of gold and ivory. Under the successors of Alexander the abundance of ivory had reached its height. In the triumph of Ptolemy Philadelphus in Egypt, six hundred elephant's teeth were carried by Ethiopian slaves; and, according to the belief of M. Quatremère de Quincy, amongst the infinite number of statues in that triumph, some of colossal dimensions, drawn upon enormous cars, there must have been undoubtedly many of gold and ivory. The same Ptolemy built a portico of ivory adorned with figures of the like material, in his celebrated ship described by Athenæus.

The total subjection of the republics of Greece to the Roman power, upon the dissolution of the Achaian League, rendered the arts of Greece tributary to the conquerors; for, not only were the tasteful spoils of the Republics conveyed to Rome to adorn the pomps of the victors, but the sources from which the arts had derived their means of existence were poured into the treasuries of the mistress of the world. Rome became the resort of the most skilful artists of all nations, and especially of Greece; and the love for sculpture grew to be universal, when the means for its gratification were so abundant. The taste for sculpture in ivory was introduced before the time of Cæsar; and