WOMAN IN ART
pression in art is a thing apart, not comparable with that of any other nation. Investigation along the line of anthropology sets forth a reasonable reason for this advance in mentality, hence in unusual beauty of face and form.
We are all children in the use of the ubiquitous Why, when it concerns wished-for knowledge. There was scant similarity between Egyptian and Greek even after centuries of sovereignty of Greeks over the Nile Valley. A commingling of the nations seems to have produced a sort of hybrid art so far as painting was concerned; Egyptian portraits from the Fayyum indicate women of dark complexion and black eyes, but of refined features and high foreheads unlike the Egyptians. That we have any knowledge at all of the art of painting of that period in Greece is due to the writers and not to the painters. That more perishable art vanished centuries ago, leaving sculpture and architecture to stand for the glory of Greek art. The developing of that art covered about seven hundred years, the wave of progress rising till its height of strength and beauty was reached about 300 B. C. in the brilliant constellation that had for stars of the first magnitude Phidias, Scopas, Polyclitus, Praxiteles, with Pericles for the national spokesman, who led a host of other craftsmen of the square, mallet and chisel, who populated the whole out-spread of Greece and Asia Minor with exquisite figures in marble and bronze.
Mythology furnished their motifs, and their numerous deities began to take form as dazzling ideals of physical beauty and valor. Venus, Victory, Athena, Diana, Niobe—phases of woman's beauty and bravery—all appear in plural number, and Caryatides still bear the burdens that man in the name of art laid upon female heads and shoulders, albeit mostly housed now in modern museums.
Beautiful in form, proportion, and features, not forgetting strength and dignity, where did their superb models come from? Whence the mentality that produced their poets, dramatists, and thinkers who brillianced the centuries of Greek dominance in culture? The various shades of life in tribes and nations are needed in the weaving of the endless tapestry of humanity; shades of skin may count with some, but in the study of art it is the shade of mentality, of innate moral fibre and refinement, that counts.
Not all the inhabitants of Greece, nor even of Athens, were artists, nor men of letters. There were as wide differences in humans then as now and here. The Athenians were of the highest type of all the tribes and clans that for various reasons were tempted to the shores of Greece from a northern coun-
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