Page:History of Art in Primitive Greece - Mycenian Art Vol 2.djvu/228

Idols. 185 it was in allusion to this very peculiar custom. It requires some effort of the imagination to picture to ourselves the ancestofs of the Hellenes going about with tattooed and painted bodies like Red Indians. But as we handle the rude tools of stone and bone which for centuries were the only implements known on the coasts of the ^gean, we must fain surrender to the logic of facts, and the evidence furnished by recent finds from these same graves, where by the side of the figures in question were found large balls of colouring matter, intense blue and deep red,' which doubtless were remains of pigments used in painting the dead at the time of interment. The persons to whom they had served after death, had employed them during their lifetime to trace on the face, arms, and breast patterns of many colours, which varied from one individual to another. These, it may be, were the sole adornment of the tribal chiefs in the opening of the archaic period. Most of the figures are but from fifteen to twenty centimetres in height; but the rich collection preserved in the Athenian Museum contains several specimens double that size ; the biggest of all, as far as I know, reaches one metre fifty centimetres in height ; the length of the face alone being twenty-five centi- metres. The head in Fig. 332 e.ceeds this by four centimetres ; that is to say, we have here a specimen with almost the normal stature of woman. They were real statues, Such tall simulacra as these could not be placed in graves which, as a rule, are one metre twenty centimetres at the side ; accordingly, like most Argolic vases collected in the rock-cut graves, they are found ' Al/tenische Mittheilungm.