ABSTRACT
It is generally admitted that the Greeks were an artist people; with them good taste and a refined appreciation of the beautiful were not the prerogatives of the élite, but were common to all. “Not a thing that has been dug up in Hellenic soil but has this flower of elegance, this exquisite and sober feeling for harmony, which gives the impression of a race supremely gifted for art.” 2 In the humblest monuments of industrial art one feels that the workman is every whit as fully alive to the lines of his vase or the proper adaptation of his decoration as a great painter or sculptor. This notion, however, must not be exaggerated, as has sometimes been done, if we are to avoid hasty generalizations and that lack of fine discrimination combined with realization of complexity which mars so many works on Greek art. Though the average of artistic production in Greece may be much superior to that of other lands, it should be acknowledged frankly that many of the objects dug up in the course of excavations do not justify rapturous admiration. But let us freely admit, since it is the obvious truth, that nowhere else is there so close a relationship between the productions of “high art” and the “minor arts,” nor so general a care for the beauty of form and line independently of the value or destination of the object.
