Speaking more generally, we find continually in the pediments reminiscences of ceramic drawing and treatment. The acroteria, painted in black and red on the natural surface of poros stone, take the shape of palmettes and lotuses. The cornices above and below are of clay or poros, painted in just such designs as appear on the Olympian terracottas; and these designs are frequently repeated in the sculptures themselves. The feathers of Typhon's wings are conventionally represented by a scale-pattern; the arc of the scales has been drawn with compass; we observe still the hole left in the centre by the leg of the compass. The larger pinions at the ends of the wings have been outlined, regularly by incised lines, and then filled up with color. All this is as like the treatment of vase-figures, as it unlike anything else in plastic art. In the former the scale-pattern is used conventionally to denote almost anything. Fragments of vases found on the Acropolis itself picture wings in just this way; or it may be Athena's aegis, the fleece of a sheep or the earth's surface that is so represented. On the body of the Triton and the Echidna of the pediments no attempt is made to indicate movement and contortion by the position of the scales; it is everywhere the lifeless conventionality of archaic vase-drawing. In sculptured representations the scale device is dropped, and with it the rigid regularity in the ordering of the pinions. Further, in drawing the scales of the Triton, the artist has dropped usual patterns and copied exactly a so-called bar-ornament which decorates the cornice just over the pediment. Here again he chooses one of the most common motives on vases. For the body of the Echidna, on the other hand, it is the so-called lattice-work pattern which represents the scale covering,--a pattern employed in vases for the most varied purposes, and found on the earliest Cypriote pottery. Even the roll of the snake-bodies of Typhon seems to follow a conventional spiral which we find on old Rhodian ware.
The outlining and coloring of the figures is most interesting. The poros stone of the reliefs is so soft that it could easily be worked with a knife; so incised lines are constantly used, and regular geometrical designs traced. Quite an assortment of colors is employed: black, white, red, dark brown, apparent green, and in the Typhon group, blue. It is very noticeable that these reliefs, unlike the others which in general furnish the closest analogies, the metopes of the temple at Selinous and the pediment of the Megarian Treasury at Olympia, have the ground unpainted. This is distinctly after the manner of the oldest Greek pottery and of archaic wall paintings. Herein they resemble also another archaic pedimental relief, found near the old temple of Dionysos at Athens, and representing just such a procession of satyrs and mænads as appears so often on vases.
To give a local habitation to the class of pottery which most nearly influenced the artist of these reliefs, is not easy. Perhaps it is a reasonable conjecture to make it Kamiros of Rhodes. Kamiros ware shows just such an admixture of oriental and geometrical designs as characterizes our pediments. Strange monsters of all kinds are represented there; while in the reliefs before us a goodly number of such monsters are translated to Greek soil.
CARLETON L. BROWNSON.
American School of Classical Studies,
Athens, Nov. 10, 1891.