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I ONCE had a cat whom I used to tease by holding her up to a mirror. When she saw what she thought was another cat,she would arch her back and spit. I thought it very funny. But this is a strange thing — if you showed her the picture of a cat, she didn’t seem to see it at all. Dogs are the same. They will growl when they see themselves in a mirror, but if you show them a picture of another dog or even a cat, they will pay no attention to it at all. Animals, though they have eyes to see, do not see pictures.
Some people are like that. They may look at pictures but not see them. So there is a difference between looking and seeing. That’s what the Bible means when it says there are those that “have eyes, and see not.”
When I was a boy, there used to be a candy shop on the corner. On the counter was painted a silver dollar. It was painted so naturally that every one tried to pick it up. I thought it wonderful and that the artist who had done it must be a wonderful artist, too.
I remember also being taken to an art gallery where there was one picture that I liked best. To me it was a marvel. It was the picture of a door half open, with a lady peeking out from behind it. When you first looked at it, you were startled.The picture was so lifelike you could hardly believe it was not a real person looking out from behind a real door. I thought that must be the greatest kind of art — to paint something so natural and lifelike that a person would be fooled into thinking it real.
Well, the old Greek painters seemed to feel the same way about pictures. Greece, as you know, is across the Mediterranean Sea from Egypt. You may not know, however,that the Greeks were the greatest sculptors that have ever lived and were also great architects. But their pictures were not so great, for many of them were of this kind of April Fool painting that I’ve described. They tried to paint pictures that would fool people into believing they were real.
In Egypt and Assyria we know the paintings but not the names of the painters who did them. In Greece we know the names of the painters but not the paintings they did. Here is the name of the first painter whose name we do know. He was a Greek. It is a hard name, not easy like Smith or Jones,for most Greek names sound strange to us. But as he is called the father of Greek painting, you might want to remember his name. It was Polygnotus. The writers of the time of Polygnotus tell us that he was a wonderful painter, but not one of his pictures is in existence, so we have to take their word for it.
As a matter of fact, we have very few Greek paintings, and one reason that we have so few is that most of the pictures were painted on something that could be moved from place to place, like the pictures we hang on our own walls, and these movable pictures have all been lost or destroyed.
One of the most famous April Fool painters was a Greek artist named Zeuxis, who lived four hundred years before Christ was born. It is said that he painted a boy carrying a bunch of grapes and the grapes looked so real that the birds came and pecked at them, trying to eat them. He entered his picture in a contest, or match, with a rival painter named Parrhasius. It was to be decided which was the greater artist.Every one was sure that Zeuxis must get the prize because the birds were fooled into thinking the grapes he had painted were real. Parrhasius’s picture had a curtain drawn across the front of it.
“Now,” said Zeuxis to Parrhasius, “draw back the curtain and show us your picture.”
To which Parrhasius replied: “The curtain is my picture.Even you, a human being, were fooled into thinking it was real. So I win. You fooled the birds, but I fooled you. And besides, the boy you painted holding the grapes wasn’t so lifelike or he would have scared the birds away.”
But the best and worst Greek painting was on the floor of a famous hall. It was painted with fruit skins, peelings, rinds,and pieces of food as if they had fallen from the table and hadn’t been swept up. It was called the “Unswept Hall” and the Greeks thought it wonderful. But how could they have thought it beautiful or worthy of an artist, no matter how naturally and realistically it was painted?
The greatest of all the Greek painters was named Apelles.He was a great friend of that precocious young ruler and general, Alexander the Great, and painted Alexander’s portrait. And yet we know him more by two of his sayings that have become famous than by his pictures.
A shoemaker once criticized the way Apelles had painted a sandal in one of his pictures. Apelles was glad to have expert advice from one who knew sandals and he made the correction. The next day the shoemaker criticized another part of the same picture. But this time Apelles did not like the criticism, for he felt the shoemaker didn’t know what he was talking about, so he exclaimed, “Let the shoemaker stick to his last,” which meant, let him stick to his own business, to things he knows about. A last is the form on which shoes are made. Let him, therefore, criticize only the things he knows about.
Apelles was a very hard worker and made it a rule never to let a day go by without doing some worth-while work. So he used to say, “No day without a line.” Though it is more than two thousand years since he lived, we still quote these sayings. They have become proverbs. They have lasted, but none of his paintings have, though every one who lived at his time honored him and called him the greatest painter of Greece.
We are told another story to show how skilled Apelles was in handling a brush. It is said that one day he visited a friend of his, also an artist. The friend was not at home, so Apelles picked up a brush and, dipping it in paint, drew an extremely fine, thin line across a board on the artist’s easel, to see if his friend would know who’d been there. His friend returned and when he saw the painted stroke on his easel, he exclaimed:
“Apelles has been here. No one else in the world could make such a fine and beautiful brush stroke as this — except myself.”
Then he painted another line, down the length of the fine one Apelles had made, splitting it in two. Later Apelles returned. When he saw a still finer stroke down the middle of his own line, he picked up the brush once more and with another stroke did what seemed impossible. Again he divided the fine line lengthwise. “Splitting hairs,” we should call it.
I can show you no pictures with this chapter, because there are no pictures to show. What a pity there are none of these pictures left, so that we might judge for ourselves and see if they really were so wonderful!