Page:Greek Buildings Represented by Fragments in the British Museum (1908).djvu/84

68 leaf moulding, traces of which may still be seen in one place. A note on the memorandum in the Museum shows that the small square panels also had blue backgrounds. Indeed, this treatment of relief was customary. The principal sculptures and the lions also showed vestiges of colour. Newton reported that on its discovery the colossal seated figure plainly showed two colours. All the carved architectural members were painted. The colours were ultramarine and vermilion, " or pigments equal to them in intensity." Newton says that " the system adopted seems to have been to tone down the whole of the marble with a coat of varnish and wax, to paint all grounds of sculpture and ornament blue, and to pick out the mouldings with red." A lacunar margin -stone was found with bright blue upon it. This was doubtless in the recessed channel of it. At Priene, where exactly the same system of architectural coloration was followed, the recess on the soffit of the main architrave was blue, and the leaf moulding around it was picked out in red. The capital there had a red ground to its egg-and-tongue, and blue to the leaf moulding of the abacus.

The eyes of the volutes were doubtless gilt. In the account for building the Erechtheum gold leaf for gilding the eyes of the columns is mentioned. Newton

be right, I think, in speaking of the ground of wax. The most perfect ancient painted work I have ever seen, the so-called Sarcophagus of Alexander, is brightly coloured, yet the whole is harmonised and softened into waxy texture and hues. "The Greeks," says Choisy, "did not conceive of form without the association of colour. At all epochs colour was present, and even the statues were painted."

The type of construction of which the Mausoleum is an example is remarkable from the way in which the marble is handled. As usual in Greek works it is put together without mortar, the joints being polished so as to sit very close. An abundance of bronze cramps was used to link stone to stone.