610 POLYCHROMY IN GREEK STATUARY. 



of tlie colossal Apollo, that once stood in the center of the western 

 pediment. If the investigations made at the Parthenon have led only 

 to uncertain results, the frieze of the temple of Theseus, of a somewhat 

 later date than that of the Panathenes, has preserved traces of color- 

 ing. When Mr. Kewton, in 1856, on the place where the Mausoleum 

 of Halicarnassus once stood, conducted his memorable excavations, he 

 could discover on the grand frieze upon the costumes of the colossal 

 statues which crown the edifice, traces of color, which were then very 

 apparent, but are now almost extinct. 1 Polychromy, however, remains 

 still very visible on the marble lions, which no doubt came from the same 

 monument. We can easily restore the brownish-red tone of the body ? 

 and the bright red that has been put on the lips and the tongue that 

 hangs out of the half-open jaws. It will thus be seen that polychromy 

 still exists on monumental sculptures in the middle of the fourth cen- 

 tury, at a time when Scopas and his followers were decorating the 

 sumptuous tomb of the Carian king, Mausolus; the harmony has not 

 yet been interrupted that reigned between architecture, brightened by 

 elegant polychromy, and the sculpture which forms, as it were, one 

 body with the edifice. 



Is the inquiry to be carried any further 1 ? We shall look at isolated, 

 independent bas-reliefs, that escape for that very reason from the exi- 

 gencies of monumental polychromy. In this aspect funeral stela? can 

 give us curious information. In looking over the collection of Attic 

 funeral bas-reliefs, 2 published by the Academy of Sciences in Vienna, 

 we gain the conviction that these steke, now mostly without any color, 

 still had received their final touch at the hands of the painter. 3 The 

 brush completed the decoration of the pediment and of the pinnacles 

 which crowned the stela and indicated the details which the sculp- 

 tor had neglected, like the accessories of the toilet, the staff on which 

 the personages, clad in their cloaks, were resting, and would look as if 

 they were suspended in the air if the painter had not come to the res- 

 cue and restored the equilibrium. One of the most beautiful of the 

 stela; of the Museum at Athens, that of Prokleides, has preserved 

 traces of a red background, on which the blue drapery of a seated per- 

 sonage stands out very clearly. Another stela belonging to Aristo- 

 nantes looks now as if it had no coloring, but at the time when it was 

 discovered it still i>resented the rich decorations of its moldings, its 

 cornice, and its tympanum. "The warrior's shield," wrote Mr. Lenor- 

 mant, "was painted red, and in the background of the relief there still 

 appeared traces of the blue tint with which it had originally been cov- 

 ered again. All this has vanished under the influence of rain and 



1 C. T. Newton. Discoveries at Halicarnassus, Cnidus, and Branchido?, I, pages 101, 

 222, and ff. 



2 Die Attischen Grabreliefs. 



:( The mutual assistance which painting and scutytnre render each other in Greek 

 bas-reliefs is very interestingly discussed by Mr. Conze in the Sitzungs-Berichte 

 der Berliner Akademie, 1882. 



