Domesticity

1. The essential function of the Greek Venus is child-bearing. We fancy, many of us, the Greeks were not a domestic people. It does not indeed follow directly, from their thought of woman chiefly as a bearer of children, that their life should be domestic in our sense. But it was domestic in our sense, and its strength depended on its being so. That, and the power of the Roman and the power of Feudalism are but one great Papacy or Fatherhood, all their life depending on the love and obedience rendered by children to their parents, and on the parents looking to it that they deserved the obedience they claimed. And for wifehood I know not in all the range of modern novels, anything quite so pretty in domesticity as the scene in Xenophon's Œconomics between the Athenian husband and his bride of fifteen, when he takes her first to see all his cupboards and gives her the keys.

2. Now all Greek art, all Venetian art, all fine German art—Dürer and Holbein chiefly—and all fine English art—Gainsborough and Reynolds—is founded on Domesticity; and all Florentine art, as such, on the reverse of domesticity—on Monachism, or forms of Imaginative Passion; and the entry of the Greek blood into Tuscan sculpture is in nothing more marked in Niccola Pisano than by his instantly making the very beasts domestic, and instead of griffins symbolical of the sun, and dragons symbolical of the devil, supporting the pulpit of Siena on the back of a plain lioness with her cubs. There she is for you.