The other colour is that known as “anularian[1925] white;” being used for giving a brilliant whiteness to the figures of females.[1926] This, too, is prepared from a kind of chalk, combined with the glassy paste which the lower classes wear in their rings:[1927] hence it is, that it has the name “anulare.”
CHAP. 31. (7.)—WHICH COLOURS DO NOT ADMIT OF BEING LAID ON A WET COATING.
Those among the colours which require a dry, cretaceous, coating,[1928] and refuse to adhere to a wet surface, are purpurissum, indicum, cæruleum,[1929] melinum, orpiment, appianum, and ceruse. Wax, too, is stained with all these colouring substances for encaustic painting;[1930] a process which does not admit of being applied to walls, but is in common use[1931] by way of ornament for ships of war, and, indeed, merchant-ships at the present day. As we go so far as to paint these vehicles of danger, no one can be surprised if we paint our funeral piles as well, or if we have our gladiators conveyed in handsome carriages to the scene of death, or, at all events, of carnage. When we only contemplate this extensive variety of colours, we cannot but admire the ingenuity displayed by the men of former days.
CHAP. 32.—WHAT COLOURS WERE USED BY THE ANCIENTS IN PAINTING.
It was with four colours only,[1932] that Apelles,[1933] Echion, Melanthius, and Nicomachus, those most illustrous painters, executed their immortal works; melinum[1934] for the white, Attic sil[1935] for the yellow, Pontic sinopis for the red, and atramentum for the black;[1936] and yet a single picture of theirs has sold before now for the treasures of whole cities. But at the present day, when purple is employed for colouring walls even, and when India sends to us the slime[1937] of her rivers, and the corrupt blood of her dragons[1938] and her elephants, there is no such thing as a picture of high quality produced. Everything, in fact, was superior at a time when the resources of art were so much fewer than they now are. Yes, so it is; and the reason is, as we have already stated,[1939] that it is the material, and not the efforts of genius, that is now the object of research.
CHAP. 33.—AT WHAT TIME COMBATS OF GLADIATORS WERE FIRST PAINTED AND PUBLICLY EXHIBITED.
One folly, too, of this age of ours, in reference to painting, I must not omit. The Emperor Nero ordered a painting of himself to be executed upon canvass, of colossal proportions, one hundred and twenty feet in height; a thing till then unknown.[1940] This picture was just completed when it was burnt by lightning, with the greater part of the gardens of Maius, in which it was exhibited.
A freedman of the same prince, on the occasion of his exhibiting a show of gladiators at Antium, had the public porticos hung, as everybody knows, with paintings, in which were represented genuine portraits of the gladiators and all the other assistants. Indeed, at this place, there has been a very prevailing taste for paintings for many ages past. C. Terentius Lucanus was the first who had combats of gladiators painted for public exhibition: in honour of his grandfather, who had adopted him, he provided thirty pairs of gladiators in the Forum, for three consecutive days, and exhibited a painting of their combats in the Grove of Diana.[1941]
CHAP. 34. (8.)—THE AGE OF PAINTING; WITH THE NAMES OF THE MORE CELEBRATED WORKS AND ARTISTS, FOUR HUNDRED AND FIVE IN NUMBER.
I shall now proceed to enumerate, as briefly as possible, the more eminent among the painters; it not being consistent with the plan of this work to go into any great lengths of detail. It must suffice therefore, in some cases, to name the artist in a cursory manner only, and with reference to the account given of others; with the exception, of course, of the more famous productions of the pictorial art, whether still in existence or now lost, all of which it will be only right to take some notice of. In this department, the ordinary exactness of the Greeks has been somewhat inconsistent, in placing the painters so many Olympiads after the statuaries and toreutic[1942] artists, and the very first of them so late as the ninetieth Olympiad; seeing that Phidias himself is said to have been originally a painter, and that there was a shield at Athens which had been painted by him; in addition to which, it is universally agreed that in the eighty-third Olympiad, his brother Panænus[1943] painted, at Elis,[1944] the interior of the shield of Minerva, which had been executed by Colotes,[1945] a disciple of Phidias and his assistant in the statue of the Olympian Jupiter.[1946] And then besides, is it not equally admitted that Candaules, the last Lydian king of the race of the Heraclidæ, very generally known also by the name of Myrsilus, paid its weight in gold for a picture by the painter Bularchus,[1947] which represented the battle fought by him with the Magnetes? so great was the estimation in which the art was already held. This circumstance must of necessity have happened about the period of our Romulus; for it was in the eighteenth Olympiad that Candaules perished, or, as some writers say, in the same year as the death of Romulus: a thing which clearly demonstrates that even at that early period the art had already become famous, and had arrived at a state of great perfection.