Ancient Bronzes
Greek and Roman Bronzes. By Winifred Lamb. (Methuen. 25s.)
As the Keeper of the Greek and Roman Department at the Fitzwilliam Museum, Miss Lamb is well known to be a most competent and enthusiastic archaeologist, like Miss Gisela Richter at the Metropolitan Museum, New York. She has laid all students under an obligation by writing an excellent book on the history of artistic bronzes—excluding statues—from Minoan to Roman times, and by illustrating it with several hundred well-chosen examples. Miss Lamb is the first author to attempt a review of the whole subject, the material for which is buried in periodicals and monograph's while the bronzes themselves are dispersed over the world, but she has succeeded admirably.
Crete, two thousand years before Christ, was producing masterpieces in bronze—figurines, tripods, vases and so on. Somewhere about 1200 B.C. the empires of the Bronze Age vanished with Knossos and Mycenae and Troy ; the Age of Iron supervened and the old culture, including the art of bronze working, was lost. Recovery was slow in these dark ages. In the early archaic period, of the eighth and seventh centuries, the arts began to revive in new forms and under new Oriental influences. The next three centuries. down to about 480 B.C., saw the triumph of Greek and Etruscan bronzes, and form the main part of Miss Lamb's book. Then the masters of Greek sculpture arose, and the makers of statuettes had to take second place, content to Produce copies of famous statues or mirrors and cups for their wealthy customers. The Hellenistic period merged into the Roman, without bringing any revival. Miss Lamb recognizes the sound technique of the Roman bronzes, which are sometimes attractive, but the freshness of the older work is lacking.
Such in brief is the theme which she works out in con- siderable detail, with a thorough mastery of the material and with an occasional touch of humour. She describes the various types of bronzes produced in each period in the several regions, and brings out incidentally the importance of Etruria and Southern Italy in the development of bronze working in the seventh and sixth centuries. Who the Etruscans were is still a disputed question, and the scanty remains of their language have still to be interpreted, but it is beyond question that they evolved an original and vigorous culture and that their bronzes are of great interest, intrin- sically and in their influence on the art of their neighbours. Miss Lamb's many illustrations of Etruscan work show that, while Etruria owed much to Greece, she was not merely imitative. This is but one point to note in a book that will repay long and careful study.
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