E 97 3 
VIII. Some experiments and observations on the colours used in 
painting by the Ancients. By Sir Humphry Davy, LL. D. 
F.R.S. 
Read February 23, 1815. 
I. Introduction. 
The importance the Greeks attached to pictures, the estima- 
tion in which their great painters were held, the high prices 
paid for their most celebrated productions, and the emulation 
existing between different states with regard to the possession 
of them, prove that painting was one of the arts most culti- 
vated in ancient Greece ; the mutilated remains of the Greek 
statues, notwithstanding the efforts of modern artists during 
three centuries of civilization, are still contemplated as the 
models of perfection in sculpture, and we have no reason for 
supposing an inferior degree of excellence in the sister art, 
amongst a people to whom genius and taste were a kind of 
birthright, and who possessed a perception, which seemed 
almost instinctive, of the dignified, the beautiful, and the 
sublime. 
The works of the great masters of Greece are unfortunately 
entirely lost. They disappeared from their native country 
during the wars waged by the Romans with the successors of 
Alexander, and the later Greek republics ; and were destroyed 
either by accident, by time, or by barbarian conquerors at the 
period of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire. 
The subjects of many of these pictures are described in 
MDCCCXV. O 
