mplicity, unpretending vigour
of work, which claims no admiration either for minuteness or dexterity,
and suggests no idea of effort at all; refusal of extraneous ornament,
and perfectly arranged disposition of counted masses in a sequent order,
whether in the beads, or the ringlets of hair; this is all you have to
be pleased with; neither will you ever find, in the best Greek Art,
more. You might at first suppose that the chain of beads round the cap
was an extraneous ornament; but I have little doubt that it is as
definitely the proper fillet for the head of Hermes, as the olive for
Zeus, or corn for Triptolemus. The cap or petasus cannot have expanded
edges, there is no room for them on the coin; these must be understood,
therefore; but the nature of the cloud-petasus is explained by edging it
with beads, representing either dew or hail. The shield of Athena often
bears white pellets for hail, in like manner.

120. The third coin will, I think, at once strike you by what we moderns
should call its "vigour of character." You may observe also that the
features are finished with great care and subtlety, but at the cost of
simplicity and breadth. But the _essential_ difference between it and
the central art, is its disorder in design--you see the locks of hair
cannot be counted any longer--they are entirely dishevelled and
irregular. Now the individual character may, or may not be, a sign of
decline; but the licentiousness, the casting loose of the masses in the
design, is an infallible one. The effort at portraiture is good for art
if the men to be portrayed are good men, not otherwise. In the instance
before you, the head is that of Mithridates VI. of Pontus, who had,
indeed, the good qualities of being a linguist and a patron of the arts;
but as you will remember, murdered, according to report, his mother,
certainly his brother, certainly his wives and sisters, I have not
counted how many of his children, and from a hundred to a hundred and
fifty thousand persons besides; these last in a single day's massacre.
The effort to represent this kind of person is not by any means a method
of study from life ultimately beneficial to art.

121. This however is not the point I have to urge to-day. What I want
you to observe is that, though the master of the great time does not
attempt portraiture, he _does_ attempt animation. And as far as his
means will admit, he succeeds in making the face--you might almost
think--vulgarly a