Waldstein, Charles: Essays on the art of Pheidias (Cambridge, 1885)

96

ESSAYS ON THE ART OF PHEIDIAS.

[III.

In the later modelling of Michaelis's second class of metopes,
we never meet with the flabby undefined character of the figures
recently discovered at Olympia1. (7) The peculiar types of
head, as in the three classes of Centaur heads, and the peculiar
way in which the hair is indicated in the head and in the
beard, the character of the mouth, cheek-bone, and eye (with
prominent orbs and straight cut eye-lids), and the definite type
of Lapith-head. (8) The nature of the mechanical working of
the surface (not polished as late marble), with traces of colour,
or indications of the past application of colour, from the pe-
culiar working of the marble, or rather, from the voluntary
omission of the indication of texture by means of modelling
in some parts. (9) The nature of the corrosion, whether
partial or entire, especially if the work under consideration
is a fragment. (10) The site upon which the work was found,
if ascertainable.

Now, it will be seen that within this list of characteristics
some of the above heads are of less importance in identification
than others; such for instance is (1): for there are very many
works of Pentelic marble. Others, such as (8), the traces of
colour, or indications of the past application of colour, may
not be present in a given specimen ; but their presence would
be an important addition to the identification. One of these
characteristics alone is far from defining a given work as be-
longing to the Parthenon metopes; but the greater the number
of them found in a given work, the greater grows the probability
of its belonging to this class, until, if the work contains all these
characteristics in a marked manner, we are forced to consider it
as belonging to these metopes.

There are many reliefs, even high-reliefs, of Pentelic marble;
not so many representing the battle between Greeks and Cen-
taurs ; still fewer in figures of these dimensions, and still fewer

1 Compare, for instance, the Centaur carrying off a struggling female figure in
metope XXIX with a very similar motif in the western pediment of Olympia (Ausgrab.
II. 23, 24; Overbed;, Flaslik, 3d. ed. Fig. 90, M. N.). Not only are the lines that
indicate the muscles of the Centaur vague and washed out in the Olympian figure as
compared with the Parthenon metope, but this difference is especially marked in the
drapery of the female figures as well as in the relation between the drapery and the
nude.