VIII. Some experiments and observations on the colours used in painting by the ancients

Abstract

The importance the Greeks attached to pictures, the estima­tion in which their great painters were held, the high prices paid for their most celebrated productions, and the emulation existing between different states with regard to the possession of them, prove that painting was one of the arts most culti­vated in ancient Greece; the mutilated remains of the Greek statues, notwithstanding the efforts of modern artists during three centuries of civilization, are still contemplated as the models of perfection in sculpture, and we have no reason for supposing an inferior degree of excellence in the sister art, amongst a people to whom genius and taste were a kind of birthright, and who possessed a perception, which seemed almost instinctive, of the dignified, the beautiful, and the sublime. The works of the great masters of Greece are unfortunately entirely lost. They disappeared from their native country during the wars waged by the Romans with the successors of Alexander, and the later Greek republics; and were destroyed either by accident, by time, or by barbarian conquerors at the period of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire.