Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 48.djvu/772

700* "The labors of the sculptor and painter were combined in producing these images of Buddha, which are always colored in imitation of life, each tint of his complexion and hair being in religious conformity with divine authority, and the ceremony of 'painting of the eyes,' is always observed by devout Buddhists as a solemn festival."

It is interesting to remark that in its mural representations, Egypt shows "US transitions from sculpture to painting, or, more strictly, from painted sculpture to painting proper. In the most sculpturesque kind the painted figures stood out from the general field and formed a bas-relief. In the intermediate kind, relief-encreux, the surfaces of the painted figures did not rise above the general field, but their outlines were incised and their surfaces rendered convex. And then, finally, the incising and rounding being omitted, they became paintings.

By the Greeks also, painting was employed in making finished representations of the greater or smaller personages worshiped—now the statues in temples and now the figures on stelæ used to commemorate deceased relatives, which, cut out in relief, were, we may fairly infer, colored in common with other sculptured figures, just as were those on Etruscan sarcophagi. Of this inference there has recently been furnished a justification by the discovery of certain remains which, while they show the use of color in these memorials, show also the transition from raised colored figures to colored figures not raised. Explorations carried on in Cyprus by Mr. Arthur Smith, of the British Museum, have disclosed—

"a series of limestone stelæ or tombstones, on which is painted the figure of the person commemorated. The surface of the limestone is prepared with a white ground, on which the figure is painted in colors and in a manner which strongly recalls the frescoes of Pompeii."

The painting being here used in aid of ancestor-worship, is in that sense, religious. Very little evidence seems forthcoming concerning other early uses of painting among the Greeks. We read that before the Persian war, the application of painting "was almost limited to the decoration of sacred edifices, and a few other religious purposes, as coloring or imitating bas-reliefs, and in representations of religious rites on vases or otherwise." In harmony with this statement is the following from Winckelmann:—

"The reason of the slower growth of painting lies partly in the art itself, and partly in its use and application. Sculpture promoted the worship of the gods, and was in its turn promoted by it. But painting had no such advantage. It was, indeed, consecrated to the gods and temples; and some few of the latter, as that of Juno at Samos, were Pinacothecæ, or picture galleries; at Rome, likewise, paintings by the best masters were hung up in the temple of Peace, that is, in the upper rooms or arches. But paintings do not appear to have been, among the Greeks, an object of holy, undoubting reverence and adoration."