with the help of measurements mechanically taken.  At the same time, a comparison of copies makes it apparent that copyists, even when aiming to be exact in the main, often treated details and accessories with a good deal of freedom.  Of course, too, the skill and conscientiousness of the copyists varied enormously.  Finally, besides copies, we have to reckon with variations and modernizations in every degree of earlier works.  Under these circumstances it will easily be seen that the task of reconstructing a lost original from extant imitations is a very delicate and perilous one.  Who could adequately appreciate the Sistine Madonna, if the inimitable touch of Raphael were known to us only at second-hand?

Any history of Greek sculpture attempts to piece together the several classes of evidence above described.  It classifies the actual remains, seeking to assign to each piece its place and date of production and to infer from direct examination and comparison the progress of artistic methods and ideas.  And this it does with constant reference to what literature and inscriptions have to tell us.  But in the fragmentary state of our materials, it is evident that the whole subject must be beset with doubt.  Great and steady progress has indeed been made since Winckelmann, the founder of the science of classical archaeology, produced the first “History of Ancient Art” (published in 1763); but twilight still reigns over many an important question.  This general warning should be borne in mind in reading this or any other hand-book of the subject.

We may next take up the materials and the technical processes of Greek sculpture.  These may be classified as follows: 

(1) Wood.  Wood was often, if not exclusively, used for the earliest Greek temple-images, those rude xoana, of which many survived into the historical period, to be regarded with peculiar veneration.  We even hear of wooden statues made in the developed period of Greek art.  But this was certainly exceptional.  Wood plays no part worth mentioning in the fully developed sculpture of Greece, except as it entered into the making of gold and ivory statues or of the cheaper substitutes for these.

(2) Stone and marble.  Various uncrystallized limestones were frequently used in the archaic period and here and there even in the fifth century.  But white marble, in which Greece abounds, came also early into use, and its immense superiority to limestone for statuary purposes led to the abandonment of the latter.  The choicest varieties of marble were the Parian and Pentelic (cf. page 77).  Both of these were exported to every part of the Greek world.