Note (return) — THE TEMPLE ON THE ACROPOLIS BURNT BY THE PERSIANS.

It is a commonplace to say that sculpture in relief is only one branch of painting. Conze 56 publishes a sepulchral monument which seems to him to mark the first stage of growth. The surface of the figure and that of the surrounding ground remain the same; they are separated only by a shallow incised line. Conze says of it; "The tracing of the outline is no more than, and is in fact exactly the same as, the tracing employed by the Greek vase-painter when he outlined his figure with a brush full of black paint before he filled in with black the ground about it." The next step naturally is to cut away the surface outside and beyond the figures; the representation is still a picture except in the clearer marking of the bounding-line. The entire further growth and development of the Greek relief is in the direction of rounding these lines and of detaching the relief more and more from the back surface. This primitive picturesque method of treatment is found as well in high relief as in low. How then can the process of development be different for the two? I quote from Friedrichs-Wolters 57 on the metopes of the temple of Apollon at Selinous, which are distinctly in high relief: "The relief of these works stands very near to the origin of relief-style. The surface of the figures is kept flat throughout, although the effort to represent them in their full roundness is not to be mistaken. Only later were relief-figures rounded on the front and sides after the manner of free figures. Originally, whether in high or in low relief, they were flat forms, modelled for the plane surface whose ornament they were to be." As the sculptured works were brought out further and further from the background, this background tended to disappear. It was no longer a distinctly marked surface on which the figures were projected, but now higher and now lower, serving only to hold the figures together. When this point was reached, the entire separation of the figures from one another and from the background, became easy. That is, the change in conception is an easy step by which the relief was lost and free-standing figures substituted. This process of change was especially rapid in pedimental groups, for the reason stated above. The pediment field from its architectonic conditions was never suited to decoration in relief. But we find from the works before us that such a system was at least attempted, that painting and an increased projection of relief were employed as aids. We are bound to seek a logical explanation of the facts and of their bearing on the later history of art, and it is safer to assume a process of regular development than a series of anomalous changes. Koepp (cf. supra), for example, assumes that these two pediments in low relief are simply exceptions to the general rule, accounting for them by the fact that it was difficult to work out high reliefs from the poros stone of which they were made. He seems to forget that the higher reliefs from the Acropolis are of the same poros. This material in fact appears to have been chosen by the artist because it was almost as easy to incise and carve as the wood and clay to which he had been accustomed. The monuments of later Greek art give no hint of a distinction to be drawn between high and low relief. We find on the same stele figures barely attached to the ground, and others in mere outline. If then there are reasons for finding the origin of pedimental decoration in a plane or low-relief composition of terracotta, made more effective both by a framing of like material and technic, and by the acroteria at either extremity and above, then the process of development which leads at length to the pediments at Aegina and the Parthenon becomes at once easy and natural. We note first the change from terracotta to a low painted relief in stone, then this relief becomes, from the necessities of the case, higher and higher until finally it gives place to free figures.