Page:The venture; an annual of art and literature.djvu/45

 even than this happy plaster, when there is real colour in stone, greyish, greenish, yellowish, the natural metallic stain. It is all light in tone; nothing darker, I suppose, than the brown of the stone that built the Florentine palaces, and all else lighter. The quarry yields light colours in all countries, colours as pale as dust, but brighter in their paleness, with the greater keenness and freshness of the rock. But the nobler old stone has a kind of life in its colour, as though you could see some little way into it, as into a fruit or a child's flesh. Such is the old marble, but not the new.

We may suppose that it was because they had new marble and not old, as we understand old age for marble, that the Greeks were obliged to colour their temples. It is with something like dismay that we look where Ruskin points, at "temples whose azure and purple once flamed above the Grecian promontories." Were they azure indeed? It seems impossible to set any blue against a sky. Nay, the sky forbids blue walls. Be they dark or light, they must either repeat the celestial blue, or vary from it with an almost sickening effect. Who has not seen a blue Italian sky, blue as it is at midsummer right down to the horizon, at odds with a great blue house, either a little greener or a little more violet than itself? Blue is a colour that cannot bear such risks. And "purple" sounds dark, as though Greece might have had to endure a distress of colour such as that which comes of the thin dark slates of purple wherewith our suburbs are roofed. If one could be justified, by any trace of colour in any chink, in believing that transparent