POLYCHROMY IN GREEK STATUARY. 605 



Who does riot nowadays know the head of one of the triple busts of 

 Typhon, or "Blue Beard," to give its popular name? 1 With his hlue 

 hair and beard, his big eyes and their yellow eyeballs, his green iris 

 hollowed out into a black hole to represent the pupil, this head would 

 seem to have been a challenge to good sense if we did not know that 

 the painter had purposely remained within the bounds of conventional 

 rules. In like manner we see, with no very great astonishment, among 

 the fragments of another pediment, two lions with pale pink bodies tear- 

 ing with their claws the body of a blue bull, on which long red lines 

 represent streams of blood. Blue and red are evidently the favorite 

 colors of architectural polychromy, and their choice is easily explained. 

 The painter who colored these pediments desired, first of all, to bring 

 them in harmony with the architecture. He therefore employed the 

 same warm and vibrating tones which enliven the architraves and the 

 ogees. 



Painting all over, because the material requires it, conventional paint- 

 ing, because it had to conform to that used in architecture — such is 

 the nature of polychromy in monumental sculpture toward the middle 

 of the sixth century before our era. When this rule is applied to 

 bas-reliefs it leads to consequences which are original enough to be 

 pointed out here. In fact, the polychromy of bas-reliefs, looked at in 

 the light of what in the language of studios is known as the relation of 

 values, may be considered under two aspects, either the figures stand out 

 vigorously from a light background or they are disappearing in the clear 

 from a dark background. The primitive artist who worked in soft stone 

 naturally preferred the former method. One of the pediments of the 

 Acropolis of Athens, that in which Hercules fights the hydra of Lernea, 

 shows us a kind of silhouette reproduction of figures painted all over 

 on a ground which preserves the natural color of the stone. 2 The com- 

 bined effect recalls quite forcibly that produced by vases with black 

 figures, on which the various personages contrast with a ground of 

 clay. This analogy with the painting of vases has seemed more strik- 

 ing since we have become acquainted with the tufa metopes of the treas- 

 ure of the Sicyonians discovered atDelphi. Notonly has the background 

 on these metopes never been touched by the brush of the painter, but by 

 the side of personages, colored with bister or an orange-red, inscriptions 

 in black letters indicate their names. 3 We could not imagine a more 

 perfect resemblance to the decoration of a Corinthian vase. Such facts 

 lead us to think that the polychromy of the bas-reliefs has pretty closely 

 followed the traditions of painting. Thus, it also feels effects of the 



'It lias been reproduced with its colors in a large lithographic plate in Antike 

 Denkmaeler herausgegehen von deutschen arctueologischen Institut, I, 1889, pi, 

 XXX. Compare plate II of my Histoire de la sculpture grecque, Vol. I. 



2 See P. I. Meyer, Athenische Mittheilungen, X, pages 237-322, and the comparison 

 with the painting of vases pointed out by Mr. Brownson, American Journal of Archae- 

 ology, VIII, pages 28-41. 



3 See the article by Mr. Homolle, Gazette des Beaux Arts, December 1, 1894. 



