A HUGE TASK.

Otago Daily Times, Issue 20644, 16 February 1929, Page 22

A HUGE TASK.

HISTORICAL RESEARCH. One hundred thousand antique vases scattered in museums and private collections throughout the world are to be photographed for historical purposes, and collected together in a work to be called the Corpus Vasorum Antiquorura.” ihe work (says the New York correspondent of the British United Press) will be earned on under the auspices of the International Union of Academies and the director is M. Edmond Pottier, curator of vases in the Louvre, Paris. The work will take so long that only the youngest of the collaborators can hope to witness its completion. “The antique vase, though we look for it in vain in the pages of classical authors, becomes, to the modern student, a most important historical document,” declared Mr Mortimer Graves, assistant secretary to the Council of Learned Societies in America. Without the vases the history of classical painting is almost a closed book. “Invaluable as the vases are for the history of decoration,” added Mr Graves,' “they arc no less so for the broader field of the history of general culture. For uo subject was too sublime, and none too mean, for the classical artist’s brush. The home, the market place, the temple, the hunt, the voyage, and the battle, come before us in the black or red figures of an Athenian vase with a vividness - that the most able historian can only suggest. The famous Francois vase in Florence, for instance, has been called an illustrated Greek Bible. Others are merely comic.” Ancient pottery of Great Britain will be included in the collection.