BIBLIOGRAPHY AND SOURCES. The sources of our knowledge of Greek art are twofold—the extant remains and the literary tradition. The monuments are, of course, the basis of all dis cussion of questions of style and technique; but their value is limited in the field of architecture by the ruined condition to which most ancient buildings have been reduced; while in sculpture the vast majority of the statues which fill the museums are copies of a later age, from which the style of the great masters must be extracted by careful and extensive comparisons, in which the influence of subjective criticism must neces sarily be prominent. For the history of Greek art it is necessary to turn to the documentary evidence as preserved in inscriptions, which in clude the signatures of artists and the records of the erection of notable buildings, or in the writings of the ancients; and as these are in general late compilations, it follows that precision is sadly lacking on many points, and that our knowledge of the individual artists rests more often on skillful combinations than on positive evidence. One reason for this is the attitude of the Greeks themselves toward artists during the fifth and fourth centuries B.C. In general, while the work was highly valued, the artist was an object of little interest. This was due to the low esteem in which the artisan was held, as one whose confining labor hindered him from serving the State or cultivating his body or mind. Consequently, when in the third century B.C. in terest in the personality of the great artists of the past arose, information was not always at tainable.
The earliest treatises on art are naturally technical rather than historical. The Argive sculptor Polyclitus in his Canon discussed the correct proportions of the human form, and Ictinus, the architect of the Parthenon, wrote a technical description of his masterpiece. Not until the early part of the third century does a history of the earlier art appear. Xenocrates, an artist of the Sicyonian School, seems to have prepared a critical study of the great sculptors from the time of Phidias, in which he aimed to show that perfection had been reached only with Lysippus of Sicyon. A chronological ar
rangement was probably no part of his scheme, and it is not certain that he gave any account of the predecessors of Phidias, whom he chose to regard as the real founder of plastic art. At Pergamon the history of Greek_ art and the chronology and characteristics of the artists were worked out by such writers as Antigonus of Carystus and Polemon, often from very uncer tain evidence, and with not a little freedom of combination. The writings of these men have perished, but their views have been preserved in the Natural History of Pliny the Elder and the Description, of Greece by the traveler Pausanias, as well as by later lexicographers and scholiasts. The testimony of the classical writers to the history of art has been collected by J. Overbeck, Antike Schriftguellen zur Geschichte der bilden den Kiinste bei den Griechen (Leipzig, 1868), and by H. Stuart Jones, Select Passages from Ancient Writers Illustrative of the History of Greek Sculpture (London, 1895), containing also an English translation and commentary. There is an extensive literature dealing with the histor ical studies of the ancients and the sources of the extant writers, which is conveniently sum marized in Jex-Blake and Sellars, The Elder Pliny's Chapters on. the History of Art (Lon don, 1896). This book contains the text of Pliny, with translation and commentary, an in troduction discussing the sources, and a good bibliography. The signatures of the Greek artists were collected by Loewy, Inschriften griechischer Bildhauer (Leipzig, 1885) ; but this work needs supplementing, as many more are now known. For architecture, the only surviving literary source is the work of Vitruvius (q.v.), a practical architect of the time of Augustus, who drew from lost Greek writers, whom he sometimes mis understood and mistranslated.