44 On Architectural Colouring. 
the circumlithio of statues. The statue-painters were known as 
eykavorat, t.e., artists who used wax. The advantages of its use on 
marble, whether of architecture or of sculpture, with or without 
the addition of colour, were its permanence and transparency, and 
its resistance of atmospheric influences. Examples of painted 
surfaces from the Theseum, the Propyle, and the Pinacotheca at 
Athens, were not long ago submitted to analysis by Mr. Farraday, 
in England, and to a French chemist, M. Landerer, and in almost 
every case wax was discovered by them as the medium of the 
colours. It was also the favourite medium for moveable pictures. 
A mode of its use is illustrated in a small painting found at Pom- 
pell, where an artist is represented mixing his colours on a stone 
slab with a fire burning beneath it. It appears to have been the 
medium most common in use for architectural decoration by the 
Romans as well as by the Greeks; and it was used for all sorts of | 
artistic purposes throughout the middle ages. Wax is prescribed 
among the recipes of the Lucca MS. in the eighth century, and 
in the MS. of Eraclius of the eleventh or twelfth centuries. In the 
French MS. of Pierre de St. Audemar it is prescribed as a varnish 
to protect vermilion from the damp and air. And throughout the 
old documents of English works of art connected with painted 
architecture, it is mentioned as an ingredient commonly supplied 
to painters. 
In medizval art, the encaustic system of burning in the wax 
does not appear to have been used north of the Alps. Wax is 
prescribed in the French MS. of La Begue, in the fifteenth century, 
to be mixed with white lead as a ground for painting ; and other- 
wise used also with size and mastic. The receipt of an English 
artist of the fourteenth century was found not long ago at Roches- 
ter, describing its use, when melted with resins and other 
materials. 
I am strongly convinced by the universal opinion of artists 
employed in architectural painting, from the early days of Greek 
art to those of the later middle ages in Europe, that wax was the 
most highly valued ingredient in their hands. It was commonly 
used by them as a ground for their work, a medium for their 
