Essays in Portraiture (7-8)

POLYSTRATUS Yes, surely, when it has been completed to the uttermost detail; for there is still, despite your unexampled zeal, one beauty that you have left out of your statue in collecting and combining everything as you did.

LYCINUS What is that?

POLYSTRATUS Not the most unimportant, my friend, unless you will maintain that perfection of form is but little enhanced by colour and appropriateness in each detail, so that just those parts will be black which should be black and those white which should be, and the flush of life will glow upon the surface, and so forth. I fear we still stand in need of the most important feature!

LYCINUS Where then can we get all that? Or shall we call in the painters, of course, and particularly those who excelled in mixing their colours and in applying them judiciously? Come, then, let us call

in Polygnotus and Euphranor of old, and Apelles and Aétion. Let them divide up the work, and let Euphranor colour the hair as he painted Hera’s:[*] let Polygnotus do the becomingness of her brows and the faint flush of her cheeks, just as he did Cassandra in the Lesche at Delphi,[*] and let him also do her clothing, which shall be of the most delicate texture, so that it not only clings close where it should, but a great deal of it floats in the air. The body Apelles shall represent after the manner of his Pacate,[*] not too white but just suffused with red; and her lips shall be done by Aétion like Roxana’s.[*] But stay!

We have Homer, the best of all painters, éven in the presence of Euphranor and Apelles. Let her be throughout of a colour like that which Homer gave to the thighs of Menelaus when he likened them to ivory tinged with crimson;[*] and let him also paint the eyes and make her “ox-eyed.” The Theban poet, too, shall lend him a hand in the work, to give her ‘violet brows.”[*] Yes, and Homer shall make her “laughter-loving” and “white-armed" and “rosy-fingered,” and, in a word, shall liken her to golden Aphrodite far more fittingly than he did the daughter of Briseus.[*]