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I

Classical antiquity seems to have confined its atten-
tion to chance images of three kinds: those in rocks,
blots, and clouds. For the first two, our earliest source
is Pliny's Natural History, although his references to
these phenomena are clearly derived from Greek
(probably Hellenistic) literature. He tells of an image
of Silenus found inside a block of Parian marble that
had been split open with wedges (XXXVI, v) and of
“the agate of Pyrrhus on which could be seen Apollo
with his lyre and the nine muses, each with her proper
attribute, rendered not by art but by nature, through
the pattern of the spots” (XXXVII, i). The context from

which Pliny lifted these passages cannot be recon-
structed; the images, absurdly perfect down to the last
iconographic detail, are apparently cited as evidence
of the miraculous generative powers of Nature, supe-
rior to any man-made artifact. Somewhat more illumi-
nating is Pliny's story about a panting dog in a picture
by the famous Hellenistic painter Protogenes (XXXV,
x). The artist tried in vain to represent the foam issuing
from the mouth of the animal until, in a rage, he hurled
a sponge at his panel and thereby achieved the desired
result. This dog, Pliny states, “was wondrously made,”
since the natural effect was the work of fortuna. The
same story, he informs us, is told of another famous
painter, Nealces, with a horse taking the place of the
dog. A variant of the latter version, substituting Apelles
for Nealces, occurs in the sixty-fourth oration of Dio
Chrysostom, which deals with the workings of fortuna.
Here again the chance image is so perfect as to surpass
any human intention. The inference to be drawn from
the sponge story, it would seem, is that Fortune re-
serves such “strokes of luck” only for the greatest of
artists, as if on occasion she took pity on their ambition
to achieve the impossible.

It must have been these accounts of incredibly per-
fect chance images that provoked the following skep-
tical rejoinder from Cicero:

(De divinatione I, xiii).

This early hint at the rationalist explanation of chance
images corresponds to the classicistic taste that domi-
nated Roman art of the late Republic and the Augustan
era (note the references to classic Greek masters). The
story of the sponge-throwing painter, in contrast, re-
flects an admiration for spontaneity, for inspired grop-
ing by a great individual as against an impersonal ideal
of perfection. If fortuna favors only artists of the stat-
ure of Protogenes, Nealces, or Apelles, is she not just
another name for genius? Such an unclassical (one is
tempted to call it romantic) attitude seems to have
existed in Hellenistic art, although it cannot be docu-
mented from surviving examples. An echo of it may
be found in another passage of Pliny's Natural History
(XXXV, cxlv) that speaks of painters whose unfinished
pictures were sometimes even more admirable than
their completed work, because they still showed the
lines of the original sketch and thus revealed the work-
ing of the artist's mind.

The agate of Pyrrhus, too, although obviously myth-
ical, has a bearing on artistic practice. Greeks and
Romans greatly admired carved gems of varicolored
semiprecious stones, as attested by the large number
of preserved specimens. In many of these, the design
takes advantage of, and may indeed have been sug-
gested by, the striations of the material. Thus the value
of a gem stone was probably measured by its potential
in this respect even more than by its rarity, and those
that lent themselves particularly well to carving would
have been looked upon as miraculous “images made
(or at least preshaped) by Nature.” How far human
skill has been “aided by Nature” in any given case is
of course difficult to assess after the carving is finished,
although certain gems indicate that the artist wanted
to suggest that such aid had been considerable.

The ancient marble sculptor's interest in chance
effects, suggested by the tales of images found in
cracked blocks, is even harder to verify. One wide-
spread feature of later Greek and Roman decoration,
the foliage mask (Figure 1), may have originated in
this way. Ladendorf has proposed that it developed
from the acanthus ornament crowning Attic grave
steles, which sometimes tends to assume the appear-
ance of a human face (Figure 2). This physiognomic
effect is so unobtrusive that, in the beginning at least,
it could hardly have been intentional. A stele (an up-
right stone slab or pillar) evokes the image of a standing
figure, and its upper terminus thus may be viewed as
its “head.” Perhaps this notion was unconsciously pres-
ent in the carver's mind. In any event he must have
become aware at some point of the face hidden among
the foliage, and from then on the effect was exploited
quite explicitly. The foliage mask, then, could be
termed an “institutionalized chance image.”

Figures that are seen in clouds are noted by Aristotle
(Meteorology I, ii) and briefly mentioned in Pliny's
Natural History (II, lxi) and other ancient authors.
Because of their instability and remoteness, however,
they were not given the significance of the miraculous
images made by Nature or Fortune in rocks and blots,
and their origin rarely excited speculation. An excep-
tion is Lucretius (De rerum natura IV, 129ff.), who
found them a challenge to his theory that all images
are material films given off by objects somewhat in
the manner of snakes shedding their outer skin. Since
cloud figures are unstable, there cannot be any objects
from which these image films emanate; Lucretius
therefore postulates the spontaneous generation of such
films in the upper air—an ingenious but hardly persua-
sive solution. By far the most interesting analysis of
the phenomenon, linking it for the first time with the

process of artistic creation, occurs in a memorable
dialogue in Philostratus' Apollonius of Tyana (II, 22).
Apollonius and his interlocutor, Damis, agree that the
painter's purpose is to make exact likenesses of every-
thing under the sun; and that these images are make-
believe, since the picture consists in fact of nothing
but pigments. They further agree that the images seen
in clouds are make-believe, too. But, Apollonius asks,
must we then assume that God is an artist, who amuses
himself by drawing these figures? And he concludes
that those configurations are produced at random,
without any divine significance; it is man, through his
natural gift of make-believe, that gives them regular
shape and existence. This gift of make-believe (i.e.,
imagination) is the common property of all. What
distinguishes the artist from the layman is his ability
to reproduce his mental images in material form. To
Philostratus the difference between cloud figures and
painted images would thus seem to be one of degree
only: the artist projects images into the pigments on
his panel the way all of us project images into the
random shapes of clouds, but he articulates them more
clearly because of his manual skill. Although this view
clearly reflects the growing ascendency of fantasia
over mimesis—of imagination over imitation—that had
been asserting itself in the attitude of the ancients
toward the visual arts ever since Hellenistic times, it
retains the traditional conception of painting and
sculpture as crafts or “mechanical arts” as against the
“liberal arts.” That the artist might be distinguished
from the nonartist by the quality of his imagination
rather than by his manual training did not occur to
Philostratus. If it had, he would have anticipated an
achievement of the Renaissance by more than a thou-
sand years. Nor did ancient painters think of the pig-
ments on their panels as a “hunting ground” for images
analogous to clouds; they seem, in fact, to have been
repelled by clouds—the skies in ancient landscapes are
devoid of them, and even where the subject requires
them (as in The Sacrifice of Iphigenia, Naples) they
appear as the merest wisps. This aversion was clearly
a matter of aesthetics, not of disability. Ancient paint-
ers commanded all the illusionistic techniques for
rendering clouds, and bequeathed them to Early
Christian art, where clouds are conspicuous.