In this article from 1913, author D.J. Finn (Daniel J. Finn, SJ) examines the true polychromatic nature of Greek sculpture throughout its different ages; and rails against the contemporary (then, and now) misassociation of ‘pure’ white marble statuary as both the height of the Grecian art form and the height of aspiration for contemporary (then, and now) artwork. This confusion and fundamental misunderstanding of Greek art, and it’s lasting impact, is summed up in his conclusion:
“Living form and colour can be parted only by those who deliberately seek for art. Only in Hades is there colourless gloom, and the Greek liked it as little as we do a London fog.”
D.J. Finn, ‘The Greeks and Painted Sculpture’, Studies: An Irish Review, Vol. 2, No. 6 (June 1913), 20 – 31. JSTOR link: https://www.jstor.org/stable/30082603
Sculpture is not appreciated in Ireland…Ireland is too poor to own works of art. And that same poverty affects our public collections. I can recall no noteworthy original piece of sculpture on show except those of the Harcourt Street Gallery. Our knowledge, therefore, of great carvings is derived (passing over photographs) from casts, ghastly, chalky spectres of some great creation. This, it would seem, is responsible for the utter lack of interest in sculpture. Our forefathers certainly were not without aspirations in this branch of art; unsettled times, the blight of a whole nation under restless and hateful government must explain the absence of development. Such a position of superficial acquaintance is in some ways helpful in viewing the historical background of the polychrome sculpture question.
The one prevalent concept that most of us form about marble or stone sculpture is whiteness. If a church is to have a new statue, the one condition that only limited means will dispense with is, “it must be real white marble.” A little boy was sending a picture of an elaborately carved altar to a friend, and so he wrote: “This is our altar. Isn’t it fine? And it’s all white marble.” He had reached what was for him, and is for thousands, the climax – white marble. Even the aesthete is imbued with the white marble idea. He prates of the “chaste” tone, and protests against any sullying; or he will not have the fair translucent material cloaked with dull patches; and as the final appeal against all Philistinism, he will not have appreciation of pure form distracted by intruding colour. These are the main objections, popular and aesthetic, to painted statuary.
What answer can be made to meet these objections? It is the intention of this paper to examine historically the practice of polychromy in a people which has had more influence on the development of sculpture than any other. Such an examination is an indirect answer, inasmuch as it points to a historical misunderstanding. There came a parting of ways, and the sign posts were misread, perhaps they were even misleading; anyhow a mistake was made. Granted that mistake, the rest becomes easier. Who really likes white marble statuary at first sight without deliberate determination to appreciate it? A person instinctively likes coloured pictures, not necessarily of the highest art, witness children’s toy-books and the wall prints in peasants’ homes. On the other hand, the appreciation of white marble sculpture is, where genuine, the outcome of a positive taste-culture, and where it is not genuinely felt, as is generally the case, it is merely the acceptance of a popular prejudice, unreasoned but quite respectable. The aesthete discloses the sources of his cant occasionally when the more passionate the chaste marble is, the higher mounts his praise, or when he commends the self-restraint that withdraws a richness for the sake of a resulting contrast, or when he grumbles that some painting is colour without form. He is ready to reverse anywhere else the tenets which he has adopted for his critique of marble.
Of all the arts, there were two that felt more than the others the full force of the Renaissance. Sculpture and architecture suddenly awoke to study perfect models. Architecture had only scattered limbs to piece together, because its works hardly survive intact the lapse of fifteen centuries; their bulk is too vast and too conspicuous not to feel the ravages of time. But sculpture can present its products in a small space; a few feet of frieze is a substantial monument, and a statuette may realise the flower of art. So it came about that renaissance sculpture merely endeavoured to pick up the thread where the ancients had let it drop. Compare the development of sculpture with that of painting, or even the allied majolica or faience work, and the intense imitation becomes patent. For painting, too, followed classic models, but these models were the classical reliefs, and their influence merely told on lines and form, leaving the colour and dimensional treatment to be the expression of the artist’s personality or school doctrine.
Medieval sculpture in limestone, in alabaster or polished gypsum, in marble, even the daintiest ivories -all was painted. I have before me an alabaster carving of the fifteenth century; it is English work, and depicts an angel upbearing St. John’s head between two saints. The carving still preserves its colours marvellously well. Every lip, nostril, and ear is brought out in colour. The vestments are bordered and ornamented with colour. Hair is gilded. Each accessory object is gilded or coloured. The angel’s garb, which supplies the background deep in shade between the two saints, is wholly painted – an olive-green with striking splashes of white for the pinions. Visit the Ivories Room of the British Museum; see the carvings of the Medieval sculptors in the Victoria and Albert; while still in the same museum, go and admire the Della Robbias. Polychromy rules in all, in most because they preceded the Renaissance, in the last-named class because the Renaissance offered no models for imitation.
It is a notorious fact that the remains of colour fade very fast from marbles that are exposed to the light after centuries of burial and concealment. It is the universal experience of classical archaeologists. A French explorer describes some colours vanishing from sarcophagi found at Carthage “comme de la fumee”. Add to this the perfectly intelligible cleaning consequent on first discovery in the earth, and the still more disastrous and less pardonable washings with acid that, until recent years, were the fate of all classical statues. Even still another risk has to be remembered, the taking of casts; now-a-days, however, at Athens, permission to take casts from polychromed statues is steadily refused. Add these fates together, and say whether their total does not offer an explanation for a prejudiced view. The Renaissance found statues dating from classical times [and] took them as they found them, and set them up as the brilliant models of sculptural perfection. That perfection involved the colourless surface resulting from exposure or cleaning.
…On the whole, the historical position offers us an explanation for the transition from the medieval polychrome to the prevalent colourless marbles. It was the birth of the prejudice which we have had to demonstrate first. Our own position is very similar to that of the first of the classic imitators: we are prejudiced from the start by our acquaintance with the white cast, they were led by the denuded marble.
That the Greeks painted statues, marble and limestone, is indisputable…Every modern excavation of archaic sites yields a new proof that sculpture was helped out or emphasised by colour through out the sixth century B.C. The early statues discovered on the Acropolis of Athens are the best known examples…In both marble and limestone we find a thoroughgoing polychromy. Take, for instance, the pedimental figure irreverently known as “Blue Beard.” He or they – a triple monster – is of limestone. Hair and beard were, on discovery, a decided blue (like the Olympian Father’s locks), which has now changed to green; the flesh is painted red all over; the eyebrows were once black within lines cut by the chisel; the eyelashes are indicated by a simple black line on the inner edge of the lids. The eyes are a masterpiece of colour; eye-ball, iris, and pupil were all indicated by legitimate sculptural means and then painted, the ball yellow, the iris green, perhaps originally blue, and the pupil black. It was the Greeks, Attic Greeks who did it, even while their black figure vases lead many a critic to regard all their attention as concentrated exclusively on form. The monster’s breast-nipples are picked out in brown, and the serpent tail that stretched away to the pediment angle was a brilliant twist of the two long blue bands and one red, cross-hatched by little bars of unpainted stone; the wings at his shoulders were parti-coloured red and blue.
“Blue Beard” is early, about 540-530 B.C.; he is limestone; he is a piece of architecture. Grant all these, yet the same principles that governed his polychromy can be traced for at very least two centuries as still operative in architectural polychrome statuary and apparently even in free sculpture. There is the desire to distinguish one set of lines or one modelled mass from another; hence came the red and the blue on the difterent “strands” of the tail, and the same colours on the imbrications of the wings. If the flesh is red, hair growing from the skin must be blue; so when the flesh parts were left unpainted, the hair became red. So, on other sculptures, a chiton is blue, a himation red, a chiton border red, a himation border blue…Red and blue were the chief colours used by the Greek stone painter, or encaustes, as he was soon to be called; his palette boasted at this period of two shades of red, a dark blue, a green, a black and sometimes a yellow ochre; the reds and the blue were used for
the large masses of colour, the rest only for details. Within the conventions thus imposed, he chooses red for flesh colour, red for a crab, red for lions, blue for a bull, and blue for a back ground, which colour seems somehow in place if one is, in the Greek manner, to neglect the background as a part of the motive. Thirdly, there is a principle of contrast by which neighbouring figures alternate in colour.
…A glance at the well-known Herakles and Hydra pedimental relief some thirty years earlier than “Blue Beard ” will illustrate these principles clearly. The background here was left plain, because blue was wanted for some of the figures. A red crab approaches from the left corner, and is just at the feet of the pair of horses. The horses are carved closely together, and to distinguish them the outer horse is dark blue, and the inner one uncoloured: the bit of the outer horse is black in his red mouth. The harness stands out in red. The chariot is mostly red succeeding to the blue horses, and in charge of it is Iolaus, with dark, apparently blue cuirass, hair, beard and eyeballs! Herakles wears his cuirass uncoloured, save for a red sword strap and tassels. Lastly, to the right is the Hydra, with dark outer bodies and plain inner ones, enjoying, however, the distinction of two green heads; black tongues emerge from its red mouths. Visualise the polychromy of this pediment, and bear in mind the three principles suggested – distinction of lines, naturalism beneath convention, and contrast. These explain, as on many a polychrome vase, the different colours for horses driven in pairs, or the change of colour for the cuirasses, and the general alternation in due succession of the tints used.
In the latter third half of the sixth century B.C. the Peisistratid power attracted Ionic talent to Athens. Among the artists of many kinds, came sculptors introducing the marble of the islands to Athens, and working that marble with an attractive grace distinctively Ionian, and lacking earnest solidity. Delicacy, exquisiteness and charming ornament are sought in all details.
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At Delphi the same taste reigned at this period, but where we have battle scenes, the warrior figures and their attributes are allowed a more thorough colouring. An important point must here be noted for the first time. Shields are always painted wholly, the usual scheme being blue outside with a red edge, (and sometimes a special scheme for the “heraldic” device), red inside with blue straps. The importance of this might well escape us if we did not recall the many compositions in which shields play a conspicuous part. We find sculptural works of all periods broken up by shields prominently displayed – the frieze under discussion from the “Cnidian” Treasury of the end of the sixth century B.C., the Aegina pediments of the early fifth century, the chariot section of the Parthenon frieze and the Phigaleian frieze of the great period, the Nereid monument and the Gjoehl-Bashi tomb from the closing years of the fifth century, the Mausoleum frieze carved about 350 B.C., and even the Magnesian frieze of late Hellenistic times…We but half grasp the significance of the shield if we view Greek sculptures denuded of their colour. It was a colour value quite as much, perhaps even more than, a form value that the Greek artist sought in this arm.
The Aeginetan sculptures and statues from the Athenian Acropolis testify to painted statuary in the first quarter of the fifth century. As in many a pediment and frieze earlier and later, these pedimental figures were set against a blue background, but here we have evidence in addition for a band of coloured ornament of the “ray” type as an upper border for the tympanum; beneath the figures, their separate plinths or bases made a line of red. Furtwangler’s general note on their polychromy puts the whole case pithily and very much to our purpose, “The nude parts, as is the universal rule with marble figures, were unpainted, while garments, cuirasses, shields, which made up the larger coloured surfaces, were symmetrically distributed.” One might read “general rule” for “universal”, and congratulate the writer on his concise felicity of description. To discuss these sculptures more fully is not our intention, but we must protest that Furtwangler drew at times too many general conclusions about their polychromy.
One point only we shall mention – sometimes an object was rendered half in marble, half in metal, and that could only be tolerable by the help of painting. The Greeks were, to torture a common phrase, barbarous enough to paint bronze figures even in the wonderful fifth century. A fifth century Gorgon head of bronze exists with eyeballs painted a bright green, iris black, teeth bright green, and its protruding tongue a lively red. The observation has an important bearing on the Parthenon sculptures, where in several cases we can detect the use of metal to complete an object begun on the marble. The Greek never actually found Athena born fully grown; only the Renaissance enjoyed that blessing; in the elder time it was a myth, and their arts followed the mortal course of birth and growth. The Parthenon was the noblest temple of its age, and, therefore, it followed in the footsteps of the earlier age.
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Very few Greek sculptures do not show a fair proportion of nude modelling, and very few, on the other hand, do not show some contrasting surface-garments, wings, weapons; most of the single free statues that are without this contrast seem to be derived from original bronzes. Thus it would seem possible that the balance of nude with drapery was sought as a balance of colour in which the polychromy of stone parts set off the marble brilliancy of the rest.
Coming to the third quarter of the fifth century, we must per-force deal with the Parthenon indirectly. It represents for the world the highest achievement of Greek sculpture, and the case is perfect if polychromy is proved for it. Direct proof is, however, lacking. The only part of the Parthenon for which we have satisfactory evidence is the frieze. Fauvel, Choiseul-Gouffier’s agent, who, in 1787, examined the Parthenon frieze from a scaffold, took casts of it, and even deported a slab to France, vouches for a blue background, for purple – which probably means the usual tint of brownish-red – drapery, for green petasi or caps, and for painted chariots both there and on the Theseum. These observations are recorded in a letter from Athens; so far was Fauvel from trying to prove a theory that he points to Egyptian reliefs and free statues as some warrant for a fact “qui ne paraitrait pas croyable”. His sharp observation records in the same letter the traces of bronze accessories, and he points out the general polychromy of the architecture…The direct evidence of the marbles at present is negligible, for casts have been taken repeatedly, and the marbles in the British Museum have been washed more than once with strong acids. Possibly Fauvel’s casts helped to remove the last traces of colour, and prepared the way for the rapid decay during the last century of the marbles left in situ. But the indirect arguments that touch the Parthenon are quite sufficient to prove the case.
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We must pass from the fifth century credited with polychromy in a few colours, evenly employed over broad surfaces that contrasted with broader nudes, to the fourth, in which in polychromy, as in all arts, greater refinement and less simplicity grew to be appreciated.
We pass over the three or four monuments upon which the professed student would dwell convinced and convincing. We pass over the grave-stones carved and coloured, or merely painted or, part-carved, part-painted. Only one type, a recent discovery, is worth noting. It is later than the fourth century, but is best mentioned here. Several instances were found at Cyrene of half-figures of women, statues in the round, whose faces were painted, not carved. Such facts must harry the souls of all true Hellenist aesthetes.
We shall stop for a moment before one statue, the pride of modern excavations – the Hermes of Praxiteles. We have texts to prove that Praxiteles sought a distinguished painter’s aid for his statues, and we have small copies of Praxitelean types coloured with very full polychromy. But nothing is so convincing as the assurance that red was on both hair and lips of the Hermes and the shoe near the ankle showed gilding, and had red binding straps. That its complete polychromy did not reach us is obvious, for the eves must have been painted. There are further indications in the rougher finish of the drapery as compared with the delicate finish of the nude. How clear the small amount of colour necessary would make the distinction between Hermes’ drapery hanging over the brown-red tree trunk and the slight drapery that has fallen off the Dionysus child! Most certainly the grape-cluster that the child stretched out its hands to grasp must have been either coloured itself, or in some coloured material, perhaps bronze. Far from detracting from the statue’s worth, such colour would heighten the brightness and the freshness of the young god’s body.
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We have coursed through the great years of Greek sculpture, and we have never missed the milestones we needed. It remains but to complete our study by a sudden bound to Augustan Rome. A statue teeming with Greek Genius, begotten of Roman pride, is our last proof. The well-known Prima Porta statue of Augustus is one of the most complete monuments of polychromy. Every detail was helped out with colour; each figure of the allegories on the cuirass had its own set of contrasting tints; the Emperor’s cloak and tunic had each their whole colour. Stand before the cast in Dublin and think back the colours on a marble original. Then you will have realised the persistence of Greek polychrome sculpture, for that statue is the offspring of an art that had been in its prime four full centuries before.
What barbarians those Greeks were! Or is it – what moles we are! There is no doubt that the Greeks painted their marble statuary. For them the supreme virtue of bronze must have been its colour effect; we know that they even tried all possible experiments to vary its colour, and to vary it still more, had recourse to insertions of red copper and white silver. The Greeks realised the union of life and colour. They lived beneath the sun, beside the flashing sea. Every sensation of the world about them came impregnated with colour. Just as the Venetian painters threw on their canvases the colours that their sea flung back, the Greek, who dreaded separation from his sea, dreaded the dismal death in-life of duller atmospheres. Socrates, in his last talk, would have us escape this grosser air, and, peeping out, see the world beyond like a ball striped with many colours. It is the vision of a child. Living form and colour can be parted only by those who deliberately seek for art. Only in Hades is there colourless gloom, and the Greek liked it as little as we do a London fog.
Image credit: Richard Mortel, Wikimedia Commons