Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 11.djvu/81

Rh and slabs of surprising magnitude and beauty, approaching the alabastrite marble in variety of colors, were conveyed thence to Rome notwithstanding the long land-carriage of more than 100 miles to the place of shipment. The quarries are entirely surrounded by trachytic hills, to which, says Hamilton, the marble "owes its crystalline and altered character, being to all appearance a portion of the older secondary limestone caught up and developed by the protruded volcanic rocks, and crystallized by igneous action."

The alabastrites marble of the ancients, or onychites, was not a marble proper, but a hard carbonate of lime, identical in composition with stalagmite, the modern alabaster. It was quarried, says Pliny, near Thebes, in Egypt, and Damascus. When first brought to Rome it was considered almost a precious stone, and was made into cups and small ornaments, such as the feet of couches and chairs. When Balbus decorated his theatre, in the time of Augustus, with four small columns of this stone, it was noted as an unprecedented occurrence; but, in the reign of Claudius, Callistus, a freedman of that emperor, adorned his banquet hall with thirty large columns of alabastrites. The ancient quarries were reopened by Mehemet Ali, Viceroy of Egypt, to obtain material to build his mausoleum at Cairo. The four magnificent pillars of this marble that support the baldacchino over the altar in the church of San Paolo fuori le Mura, in Rome, were presented by him. Each is a monolith forty feet long.

Of the yellow marbles of antiquity, that called by the Italians giallo antico is the rarest and most beautiful. There are several varieties of it, varying in tint from a cream-yellow to the deepest chrome-yellow, sometimes shading into red and purple hues. Some is as bright as gold (giallo dorato), some of an orange-shade (giallo capo), and some, extremely rare, of a canary-color (giallo paglia). The ancient writers compared it to saffron, to sunlight, and to ivory grown yellow with age. Some of it is variegated with black or dark yellow rings. The grain is exceedingly fine. Its colors are derived entirely from carbonaceous matter. Among the finest existing specimens of this marble are the large columns in the Pantheon at Rome, and a single pair in the Arch of Constantine. The giallo antico was called marmor Numidicum by the Romans, but the precise site of the quarries is not yet ascertained. M. Fournel believes that the yellow marble of Philippeville, Algeria, which closely resembles it in varying tints, is identical with it. The island of Melos and Corinth also produced yellow marbles, and in the time of Justinian a marble of a fiery yellow was quarried in the neighborhood of Jerusalem.

Among the most celebrated marbles of the ancient world was the rosso antico, or red antique. Its color passes from a red, almost scarlet, to a wine-lees or blood-red, which is divided by parallel layers of white, and sometimes also intersected by a network of delicate black veins. Its variation in tint is probably according to the