Page:History of Art in Primitive Greece - Mycenian Art Vol 1.djvu/72

The Country. 51 multitudinous and varying hues will be brought together. Thus from the fourth century b.c. architects often employ the grey marble of Hymettus in their buildings, where we are sure always to find it in the same sections ; where, too, its deep tone is strongly relieved against the lighter stone of Piraeus,^ and the blocks wrenched from the sides of Pentelicus. A time will come when art will discover, in the juxtaposition of different materials, a means for renewing its strength and youth. If on certain spots of Hellas a superabundance of marble induced the architect to make as free a use of it as elsewhere he did of stone, its greatest services to art were undoubtedly those it rendered to sculpture, and which it is impossible to over-estimate. Without marble, Greek statuary would never have risen to what it was, in the hands of masters who from the sixth century b.c. began to attack this material, and ere long found out its transcendent superiority over all others, in that it lends itself far better to a sincere presentation of all the fine shades of the undulating outline and lithsome movements of the human form. Granted that the natural intelligence of the race and the conditions of its surroundings did much to assist the rapid progress made by sculpture from henceforward in all the workshops of the Hellenic world, it remains true that the greater factor was marble. Marble, and marble alone, taught the artist to discard frigid or hard and heavy make, inseparable from wood and soft limestone, to which a long past had habituated him ; it furnished him with the means of imitating nature more closely and with greater truth than heretofore, that nature which he was beginning to regard with fondness and sympathy. Statuary marble is met on more than one point of Greece ; Scopas found it in Peloponnesus, close to Tegaea, almost ready prepared for carving the figures of the frontels and friezes with which he adorned the temple of Athene Alaea ; Mount Pentelicus, in Attica, is but an immense block of marble. From the Cyclades comes the Parian marble, the finest and most luminous of all, whose golden and softly resplendent crystals better than any other image forth the warm tones of the human flesh.^ 1 In the rocky mass lying before Piraeus is found the stone which takes its name from the harbour. — Trans. 2 A complete list of the marble quarries of Greece will be found in the very exact and instructive dissertation of G. Richard Lepsius — a son of the eminent