This polychromatic character of Greek marble sculpture is at variance with what we moderns have been accustomed to since the Renaissance.  By practice and theory we have been taught that sculpture and painting are entirely distinct arts.  And in the austere renunciation by sculpture of all color there has even been seen a special distinction, a claim to precedence in the hierarchy of the arts.  The Greeks had no such idea.  The sculpture of the older nations about them was polychromatic; their own early sculpture in wood and coarse stone was almost necessarily so; their architecture, with which sculpture was often associated, was so likewise.  The coloring of marble sculpture, then, was a natural result of the influences by which that sculpture was molded.  And, of course, the Greek eye took pleasure in the combination of form and color, and presumably would have found pure white figures like ours dull and cold.  We are better circumstanced for judging Greek taste in this matter than in the matter of colored architecture, for we possess Greek sculptures which have kept their coloring almost intact.  A sight of the “Alexander” sarcophagus, if it does not revolutionize our own taste, will at least dispel any fear that a Greek artist was capable of outraging beautiful form by a vulgarizing addition.

(3) Bronze.  This material (an alloy of copper with tin and sometimes lead), always more expensive than marble, was the favorite material of some of the most eminent sculptors (Myron, Polyclitus, Lysippus) and for certain purposes was always preferred.  The art of casting small, solid bronze images goes far back into the prehistoric period in Greece.  At an early date, too (we cannot say how early), large bronze statues could be made of a number of separate pieces, shaped by the hammer and riveted together.  Such a work was seen at Sparta by the traveler Pausanias, and was regarded by him as the most ancient existing statue in bronze.  A great impulse must have been given to bronze sculpture by the introduction of the process of hollow-casting.  Pausanias repeatedly attributes the invention of this process to Rhoecus and Theodorus, two Samian artists, who flourished apparently early in the sixth century.  This may be substantially correct, but the process is much more likely to have been borrowed from Egypt than invented independently.

In producing a bronze statue it is necessary first to make an exact clay model.  This done, the usual Greek practice seems to have been to dismember the model and take a casting of each part separately.  The several bronze pieces were then carefully united by rivets or solder, and small defects were repaired by the insertion of quadrangular patches of bronze.  The eye-sockets were always left hollow in the casting, and eyeballs of glass, metal, or other materials, imitating cornea and iris, were inserted. [Footnote:  Marble statues also sometimes had inserted eyes] Finally, the whole was gone over with appropriate tools, the hair, for example, being furrowed with a sharp graver and thus receiving a peculiar, metallic definiteness of texture.