POLYCHROMY IN GREEK STATUARY. 603 



painter, who received the same compensation as the sculptor.' What 

 such daubing- may have been toward the eighth century before our 

 era, we can at least imagine easily enough, when we look at the 

 primitive terracotta figures, and the popular images which Lave come 

 down to us like so many cheap reductions of idol statues. This vio- 

 lent daubing, these red patches that stain the cheekbones, give us an 

 impression of what this barbarous coloring may have been; and the 

 impression would no doubt be very much the same if the impossible 

 should happen, and we should dig up some wooden statue. To look for 

 laws which define the use of polychromy in works that no longer exist 

 would be building castles in the air. But what these ancient records 

 teach us is to make allowance for the religious sentiment that dwells 

 in these naive aesthetics which associate color with shape. According 

 to old Greek ideas, the statue of the god is really animated by a divine 

 power; these idols are living beings. Statues are believed to move 

 their hands, perspire drops of blood, and impart to such as touch them 

 a supernatural strength. They change miraculously their habitation — 

 a statue of Apollo goes and defends the walls of Corcyra. They are 

 adorned with jewels and with clothes ; they are perfumed like other 

 beings of flesh and blood. As a matter of course, the image of the god 

 must have every appearance of life, and art must employ all its resources, 

 giving them both shape and color. This coloring will at first be a crude 

 daubing, but it will please the god and the ~X.oa.vov under its layer of 

 vermillion or of "lees of wine", and will fill the devout worshippers 

 with the same awe with which they were later on inspired by the Athene 

 of Phidias, resplendent at the Parthenon in all the brilliancy and glory 

 of her rich, metallic polychromy. 



We will now leave those obscure days and turn our attention to 

 others still very distant, but such as have left us unmistakable evi- 

 dence — we mean monuments. During the seventh century before our 

 era, Greek sculpture began to employ a material that is more durable 

 than wood. Certain privileged schools already used marble that came 

 from Paros or Naxos, but in continental Greece the sculptors were still 

 content with softer stone — first a friable limestone, full of shells and 

 abounding in cavities; later, as their tools improved and they were 

 better able to choose their material, a stone of closer grain and more 

 resistance. The study which we are able in our day to devote to these 

 primitive sculptures extends already over a considerable number of 

 monuments. From the metopes of Selinonte to the recently discovered 

 sculptures at Delphi, belonging to the treasure of the Sycionians, a 

 large number of such examples might be enumerated. The tufa pedi- 

 ments, sculptured in bas-relief or in high-relief, which were found from 

 1882 to 1888 in the excavations of the Acropolis at Athens, occupy a 

 place of honor in this remarkable series of works. 2 



bulletin de correspondance helle'nique, 1890, page 799. Article by Homolle. 

 2 Tliey have been the subject of a very comprehensive essay by Lechat, Les sculp- 

 tures en tuf de lAcropole d'Athenes, ReA r ue arche'ologique, 1891. 



