232 ANCIENT PAINTING AS AMONG THE LOST ARTS. 



Parrliasius painted an allegorical representation of the Athen- 

 ian demos, or democracy, which Pliny said expressed at the same 

 time all the good and bad qualities of this versatile people. One 

 might trace there, he says, at once the changeable, the irritable, 

 the kind, the unjust, the forgiving, the vain glorious, the proud, 

 the humble, the fierce, the timid. Just how all this could be got 

 into one painting, it is impossible for us to conceive. But the 

 ancients certainly had a gift for doing these things. We never 

 could have believed that the whole story of the Nile could be 

 told in one piece of statuary, if we had not actually seen it.* 



Timanthes, one of the most gifted masters of Greece, was 

 most noted as the painter of the Sacrifice of Iphigeriia. On the 

 way to the siege of Troy, the Grecian fleet was detained at Aulis 

 by adverse winds. At this place, Agamemnon the leader hav- 

 ing in some way offended the goddess Diana (by killing her 

 favorite deer, I think), he was informed through Calchas, the 

 soothsayer, that he could appease the divine huntress, and raise 

 the wind embargo, in no other way than by the sacrifice of his 

 beloved daughter Ipliigenia. Reluctantly he sent for her, and 

 she was placed for the immolation, when by some legerdemain 

 human or divine, the girl was snatched away, and a hind was left 

 in her place. What w T as most remarkable about this painting 

 was, that after exhausting all the expressions of grief that he 

 could invent 011 the countenances of those present, the artist had 

 not yet touched that of Agamemnon. Then, as if to signify the 

 utter inadequacy of human power to represent the father's 

 anguish, he covered that face with a mantle, and there left it. 

 Singularly enough this famous painting was found copied on the 

 walls of the House of the Poet in Pompeii. 



Timanthes seems to have been skilled in ingenious expedients 

 to represent his ideas. In a painting of ordinary dimensions, 

 where he wished to show the enormous size of a sleeping Cyclops, 



*This colossal group is in the Vatican Museum at Rome. The giant figure 

 of the god of the Nile is partly reclining and leaning against the Egyptian 

 Sphinx. Sixteen cupids are climbing up on him, or sporting with ichneu- 

 mons and crocodiles, representing the sixteen cubits of annual overflow of 

 the Nile. There are also humorous battles of the pigmies with crocodiles and 

 hippopotami. This piece of sculpture was found in the excavations of an 

 old temple of Minerva near the Church of Santa Maria in Rome, in A.D. 1518. 



