POLYCHROMY IN GREEK STATUARY. 609 



to improve the sculptor's work by the charm of colors, and to perform 

 an artist's work without any effort to mislead the eye by a willful imi- 

 tation of the reality. Hence, the exquisite precautions he takes to pre- 

 vent any vulgar accident from tarnishing the freshness of this delicate 

 coloring! Look at this metal spike fastened to the top of the head. 

 This is to support the crescent, called a meniscus, made of wood or of 

 metal, which protects the statue against the offences committed by 

 birds, and to secure it against the defacements with which it is con- 

 stantly threatened by those indiscreet guests of the Acropolis. 



Does this coloring of the statue complete its toilet 1 ? It has been 

 justly remarked that the contrast between the painted parts and the 

 natural tint of the marble would be too painful to the eye unless a kind 

 of treatment with the hand — apatinage — should reestablish the proper 

 harmony by softening this rather crude whiteness. Archaic marbles 

 have preserved no trace of such a treatment, but this fact is easily 

 explained. But at a later date we meet with several examples, and 

 the written texts make frequent allusions to it. Nothing prevents our 

 believing that the artists of the sixth century had already compre- 

 hended the necessity of a proceeding which, as we shall see further on, 

 plays a very important part in the classic period. 



III. 



The adversaries of polychromy may look upon the limitation of 

 painting to certain parts of archaic statues as a symptom of approach- 

 ing decline. It looks to them somewhat like an ancient tradition which 

 still survives, but is doomed to disappear. Or is it rather a shrinking 

 back — a movement such as that which was observed in Italian sculp- 

 ture toward the beginning of the sixteenth century? And when, after- 

 wards, the great masters of marble statuary, with Phidias and his 

 successors, shall try to find in their modelings the most delicate tints, 

 when they shall give to drapery a matchless elegance and nobility, will 

 they not then repudiate superannuated proceedings employed by primi- 

 tive image makers in order to hide the shortcomings of their chisel? 



Here we come upon a most earnestly controverted question. As far 

 as the brilliant periods of the fifth and fourth centuries are concerned, 

 the facts are more widely scattered, the pieces of evidence do not suc- 

 ceed each other with absolute regularity, as they do in that matchless 

 totality of the sculptures on the Acropolis. Still, by combining all the 

 information we find here and there, they present a cohesion which is by 

 no means factitious, and gradually we are convinced. We come readily 

 to t\\e conclusion that polychromy has survived the primitive archaism 

 for many centuries. 



Monumental sculpture and bas-reliefs present to us certain land- 

 marks; they follow each other during a long period, extending from 470 

 to about the end of the fourth century. Traces of color have been found 

 upon the metopes of the temple of Zeus at Olympia, and on the drapery 

 SM 95 39 



