POLYCHROMY IN GREEK STATUARY. G23 



personal feeling. But we will never believe that the Greeks should at 

 any time have sought to produce by such means the illusion of reality, 

 and to represent actual flesh tints. We can readily imagine that a 

 slight, very transparent rubbing in was given to the body of the 

 Hermes, which allowed the grain of the marble to be discerned, and 

 had no other object but to lend to the naked parts a warm and uniform 

 tonality. 



The ideal restoration which we have thus sketched will enable us to 

 conclude in a few words. A writer who severely condemns the princi- 

 ple of polychromy, "the offspring of a savage instinct," quotes on this 

 subject the following lines written by Diderot: "What would be the 

 effect of the most truthful and the most beautiful coloring upon a 

 painted statue ? Bad, I think." ' We do not contradict this. Besides — 

 and we think we have made this sufficiently clear — this kind of poly- 

 chromy is not at all in question. Among the Greeks, painting a statue 

 was the result of a principle exactly opposite. Greek polychromy is, 

 above all, conventional; it has never abandoned that character. We 

 find it, at the very beginning, carry the principle of liberty within con- 

 ventionality so far as to disregard the simplest probabilities purposely 

 to limit the choice of colors and to make itself supple enough, far enough 

 from all realistic imitation, to yield without scruples to the exactions of 

 monumental polychromy. At a later period, when art had progressed, 

 far from claiming to have conquered, it knows how to respect the noble 

 material which artists use for their purposes, to play a subordinate 

 part to sculpture and to lend it very discreet assistance. Its part to 

 play is not, as has been said, to "attempt an impossible fraud," but to 

 enhance the charms of a perfect form, which remains the mistress and 

 the sovereign. For the same reason, it must always be a very delicate 

 art, all in dainty tints, hostile to violent exaggerations, and well able 

 to resist the temptations of realistic art. Now, when we admire the 

 marvels produced by industrial art in Greece, the delicate coloring of 

 the little figures (figurines) of terra cotta, the strikingly pure poly- 

 chromy of ceramics with their white ground, we must highly honor the 

 painters of statues. We do not exactly know what a work may have 

 been in which a Praxiteles and a JSTicias combined their efforts, but we 

 do know that it required all the exquisite taste and all the science of a 

 great master to realize in the Tanagra of our Luxemburg Museum the 

 harmonious alliance of form and of color. 



1 Charles Blanc. La Granimaire des arts <lu dessin, page 432. 



