616 POLYCHROMY IN GREEK STATUARY. 



house at Delos, Mr. Couve has discovered a beautiful statue of a draped 

 woman, equal iu point of elegance to the most coquettish of the little 

 Tanagra figures. The hair, artistically arranged in bandeaux, displays 

 a brownish red tint; this is exactly the type of the dressing of the 

 hair and of its color which we find in terracotta statuettes. It is, more- 

 over, the conventional color chosen by the manufacturers of such ware 

 to reproduce, as nearly as can be, that brilliant golden tinge which a 

 Greek traveler admires so greatly in the hair of Theban women. 



Toward the middle of the second century before our era, Greek art 

 undergoes a kind of evolution, which is often called a renaissance. 

 This is the time when a school of new classics, reacting against the 

 tendencies of Alexandriauism, resolutely returns to the traditions of the 

 two great centuries, when able sculptors, like Apollonius, Glycon, Cleo- 

 menes, put their names to a torso in the Vatican, a Hercules Farnese, 

 the so-called Germanicus in the Louvre, and adopt as their models the 

 works of the fifth and fourth centuries. Greek sculptors emigrate and 

 go to Italy. To satisfy the demands of their Roman patrons, they mul- 

 tiply copies of celebrated statues. The villas, the palaces of rich 

 Romans, are soon full of marbles carved by skillful artists, whose 

 works of art mostly furnished the models after being carried away out 

 of Greece. Did polychromy survive these new conditions'? Will it 

 become acclimatized under the Italian sky % It would be strange if the 

 taste for archreologic ainateurship and the erudite curiosity which were 

 aroused in Rome should not have become a guaranty for its vitality. We 

 do not see that it suddenly gives way to monochromatic sculpture. Far 

 from it. Instead of proscribing the union between sculpture and paint- 

 ing, the Italian taste eagerly accepts it. It is the time of the Emperors 

 that produced those colored marble statues of green basalt, porphyry, 

 antique red (rosso antico), which had heretofore been peculiar to 

 Egyptian art. The employment of such marbles, imported from Nu- 

 midia or Egypt, is favorable to the development of a very special kind 

 of polychromy that might be called natural polychromy. It produces 

 those statues of variegated marble which cause our modern taste to 

 hesitate, and which, if they fail to secure our admiration, at least excite 

 our curiosity. 



How could painting by the side of a statuary art so daringly many- 

 colored fail to maintain its rights, protected as they were by old tradi- 

 tions and by the prestige of Hellenic art 1 ? It maintains them so well 

 that it is to Graico-Roman sculpture we owe very many and very con- 

 clusive specimens of colored statues. In 1885, there was found in Rome, 

 on the ground of Sallust's garden, a head of Athene, which evidently is 

 a copy of the Parthenos. 1 The painter has endeavored to keep as close 

 to his model as he can and give to his work the appearance of a chrys- 

 elephantine statue. While the fiesh, carefully polished, preserves the 

 clear tint of the marble, the yellow color of the helmet represents the 



'Antike Deukinaler, 1886, 1, PI. III. 



