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Early Journal Content on JSTOR, Free to Anyone in the World This article is one of nearly 500,000 scholarly works digitized and made freely available to everyone in the world by JSTOR. Known as the Early Journal Content, this set of works include research articles, news, letters, and other writings published in more than 200 of the oldest leading academic journals. The works date from the mid-‐seventeenth to the early twentieth centuries. We encourage people to read and share the Early Journal Content openly and to tell others that this resource exists. People may post this content online or redistribute in any way for non-‐commercial purposes. Read more about Early Journal Content at http://about.jstor.org/participate-‐jstor/individuals/early-‐ journal-‐content. JSTOR is a digital library of academic journals, books, and primary source objects. JSTOR helps people discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content through a powerful research and teaching platform, and preserves this content for future generations. JSTOR is part of ITHAKA, a not-‐for-‐profit organization that also includes Ithaka S+R and Portico. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. AN ENGRAVED BRONZE BULL AT METAPONTO. FIa. 7. In the course of an extended archmological tour in Magna Greacia, undertaken last winter in the interest of the Archmological Institute of America, it was twice my fortune to visit the site of ancient Meta- pontion; and, though haunted by Mommsen's allusion to its fever- stricken plain as a locality where the traveller does not willingly tarry overnight, to remain there a couple of days on each occasion. I thus had the opportunity, besides giving an adequate examination to the noteworthy ruins and the general topography of a place teeming with historical memories, to overhaul with more than ordinary thoroughness the contents of its little museum. My efforts were principally directed to a successful search for fragments of constructive sculptural decora- tion from the ruins of a neighboring Doric temple, a structure belong- ing to a date slightly later than the larger Tavola dei Palladini, but placed among the first monuments of the stiff archaic style (600-550 B. c.): it has been recently recognized, in the light of an inscription found on the site, as a sanctuary of Lykeian Apollon, but local legend, identifying its shattered and scattered columns with the broken pillars of the house of the Philistines destroyed by the Hebrew sun-hero, has 28 AN ENGRA VED BRONZE BULL AT METAPONTO. 29 given the name Chiesa di Sansone. I hope to give, before long, an account of the fragments of sculpture I was able to gather, examine, and photograph: unusual importance attaches to them as being the first of their description found on Italic soil. It was only incidentally, as it were, that I was led to make a drawing of an object of a very differ- ent character, but to which some interest accrues from the fact that it furnishes, perhaps, the unique example of a new and striking rami- fication of the vital body of Greek art. The piece reproduced on a reduced scale of 3 :4 at the head of this article had, it would seem, attracted the notice of a more or less trained eye before my visit to the little complex of station-buildings which, with a tavern grandiloquently entitled Albergo Pitagora, constitute the Metaponto of to-day.' Beedeker's Southern Italy (German edition of 1883, p. 214) gives the following description of the " Museum " and its contents: " The objects discovered in the recent excavations are temporarily placed on view in the red house behind the station. They include a dedicatory inscription to Apollon Lykeios, which first determined the purpose of the temple; a fragment of a metope, and polychrome terracotta incrustations and constructive members from the same temple; a boar cut out of sheet bronze and of the archaic style," etc., etc. The last item, it will not be superfluous to explain, refers to the subject of the present article: there is no other piece in the Museum that could by any possibility lend itself to being taken for " a boar cut out of sheet bronze." The description, indeed, applies only with the qualifications that the animal represented is not a boar, but a bull, that the metal is not sheet bronze, but bronze plate of considerable thick- ness (3 mm.), and that the technical method of production was not cutting, but engraving helped out by filing. We shall also see that the style of the work is not in the least archaic. The technique of the specimen is so peculiar that it deserves to be signalled, if only as a rarity. I do not bear in mind any article of ' The point is the junction-station of three lines of railroad: it is passed two or three times a day by trains bound from Naples to Brindisi, from Naples to Reggio, and vice-versa, and also by those that skirt the Tarentine Gulf between Taranto and Cape Spartivento. The cultivators of the vast and fertile plain of Metaponto, that stretches prairie-like away from the eye, dwell on the eminences by which it is bor- dered, if mayhap they escape its malignant fevers; a few railroad functionaries sleep under the precarious but essential protection of a grove of eucalyptus trees. 30 AMERICAN JO URNAL OF ARCHIEOLOGY. Greek manufacture, at least in the way of art-work, that exemplifies the application of a dgcoupg process to an engraved design. Never- theless, I shall not lay stress on my impression that the piece is unique of its kind. On the contrary, it would be but natural that its publi- cation should lead to the registering of a little Corpus of congeners, very possibly scattered in various collections of antiques. Again, we do not know what the ground may bring forth: only a few years ago, the practice and art of decorating bronze hand-mirrors with engraved figure-designs was still supposed to have been confined to Etruria. To-day, the number of such mirrors found in Greece itself has become sufficient to constitute a distinct class. It is with this class of antiques that the specimen of dgcoupg engraving before us most closely affiliates. It would be absurd to emphasize the dbcoupd feature by classing it, e. g., with the perforated terracotta reliefs of Melos, the like of which seem to have been in extensive use as vase-painters' models. The superficial analogy would not hold good, any more than the concomitant suggestion as to the use and purpose of the metal specimen. Such a suggestion, perhaps, and at the first blush, would find an apparent support in the style of the design itself, which certainly does recall the animals we have seen on certain red-figured vases. But the method of produc- tion, in this case, entailed altogether too much expense, besides failing to produce results suitable for the purpose that has been named. The little bull is to all intents and purposes an engraving, pure and simple. It is designed after an art and method of inline engraving that is in every respect identical with that employed on the mirrors, whether Greek or Etruscan ; just as this, in its turn, is in no wise different from that of the Graco-Roman work on the famous cista of Praneste, or, in fact, almost any known antique engraver's work on a flat metallic surface. Anyone who has had occasion to superintend draughtsmen in the reproduction of antique linear designs (those on red-figured Greek vases, for example) knows how difficult it is to wean the con- temporary artist from his proclivity to what may be called the method of symbolic shading; whereas systematic alternation in the thickness of the line, together with all effects dependent on this studied alter- nation, was not in the manner of ancient art. The modern manner of light-and-heavy-line work, in unshaded drawings, owes its origin to the use of the pen. The pen, in antiquity, had not come into use for drawing; and antique draughtsmanship employs only even lines. Had the Greeks or their Italian disciples invented printer's ink en- AN ENGRA VED BRONZE BULL AT METAPONTO. 31 graving, its development would assuredly have followed the linear style exemplified in such work as this of our Metapontine bull. Its novelty and rarity, as a specimen of Greek art, is all in the curious process of the sawing or filing out, from the engraved plate, the out- line of the figure. All that was required of the filer-out, who may safely be presumed not to have been identical with the engraver him- self, was to follow carefully the outline already drawn for him by the engraver. In the present instance, he has done this carefully and exactly, in so far as no trace of the engraved outline remains, at least on the outer circumference, as an evidence of inaccuracy. The ring formed by the flourish of the animal's tail is also deftly sawn out. The hole in its side, on the other hand, made to receive the round nail used in uploads/Ingenierie_Lourd/ metaponto-oxford.pdf