art was made a handmaid to
religion. Phidias himself would have preferred to have executed them
in marble.

We may further remark that form, in its purest ideal, being the chief
aim of sculpture, any application of color, which would detract from
the purity and ideality of this purest of the arts, could never be
agreeable to refined taste. Coloring sculpture and giving it a
life-like reality is manifestly trenching on the province of painting,
and so departing from the true principle of sculpture, which is to
give form in its most perfect and idealized development. We must also
consider that sculpture in marble, by its whiteness, is calculated for
the display of light and shade. For this reason statues and
bas-reliefs were placed either in the open light to receive the direct
rays of the sun, or in underground places, or thermae, where they
received their light either from an upper window, or, by night, from
the strong light of a lamp, the sculptor having for that purpose
studied the effects of the shadows. It must also be remembered that
the statues in Greek and Roman temples received their light from the
upper part of the building, many of the temples being hypaethral, thus
having the benefit of a top light, the sculptor's chief aim. Color in
these statues or bas-reliefs would have tended to mar the contrasts of
light and shade, and blended them too much; for example, color a
photograph of a statue, which exhibits a marked contrast of light and
shade, and it will tend to confuse and blend the two. The taste for
polychrome sculpture in the period of the decline of art was obviously
but a returning to the primitive imperfection of art, when an attempt
was made to produce illusion in order to please the uneducated taste
of the vulgar.

The Romans derived their knowledge of painting from the Etruscans,
their ancestors and neighbors; the first Grecian painters who came to
Italy are said to have been brought over by Demaratus, the father of
Tarquinius Priscus, King of Rome; at all events Etruria appears to
have exercised extensive influence over the arts of Rome during the
reign of the Tarquins. Tradition attributes to them the first works
which were used to adorn the temples of Rome, and, according to Pliny,
not much consideration was bestowed either on the arts or on the
artists. Fabius, the first among the Romans, had some painting
executed in the temple of Salus, from which he received the name of
Pictor. The works