"Since earliest times men have loved to make small likenesses of themselves and of their animals. The ancient Greeks kept images of the gods in their houses to watch over the inmates; they place statutes in graves to please the dead, and they offered others to the nymphs of a spring so that water might flow fresh in the fountain. Such ideas lingered long and sustained a craft that gradually turned from religious to artistic pre-occupations and from the production of primitive images to true miniature sculpture."