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Updated: May 25, 2025
A quarter of a century later, when the discovery of photography had made an exact reproduction of the sculptures possible, the Dutch Government instituted an exhaustive survey of the Boro-Boedoer temple. In July, 1845, M. Shaefer was commissioned to execute photographs of the bas-reliefs, but he was only partially successful.
When the bewildered eye is satiated with the elaborate sweep of these arches and domes, with the splendors of polychromatic marbles, with friezes and pedestals of agate, with columns of oriental jasper, with angels hanging by their feet, and with all these bas-reliefs of bronze and gold, the visitor hastens to get away from it as he would to escape from a confectioner's shop.
If ever I am employed to sculpture a hero's monument, I shall think of this, as I put in the bas-reliefs of the pedestal!" "There are sermons in stones," said Hilda thoughtfully, smiling at Kenyon's morality; "and especially in the stones of Rome."
It boasted five naves, parted by four rows of columns; it was a profusion of bas-reliefs, friezes, and entablatures, and its twelve colossal statues of the Apostles looked like subordinate deities lining the approach to the master of the gods!
Coming back now to the large hall which led into the papakhu, the absence of bas-reliefs in this hall in the case of the Assyrian temples excavated by Layard, suggests that the walls of this hall were not lined with sculptured slabs, as was the case in the large rooms of the palaces; and we may conclude that in Babylonian temples, likewise, the decoration of the walls was confined as a general thing to enameled bricks, interspersed, perhaps, with metallic panels, and that mythological scenes such as the contest with Tiâmat or Gilgamesh's adventures were only occasionally portrayed.
Parallel with the gallery, on both sides of the palace-court, there runs a series of rooms devoted chiefly to pictures, although statues and bas-reliefs are likewise contained in some of them. I remember an unfinished bas-relief by Michael Angelo of a Holy Family, which I touched with my finger, because it seemed as if he might have been at work upon it only an hour ago.
A pen-and-ink drawing at the Museo Buonarroti possesses greater merit, find may perhaps have been a first rough sketch for the façade. It is not drawn to scale or worked out in the manner of practical architects; but the sketch exhibits features which we know to have existed in Buonarroti's plan masses of sculpture, with extensive bas-reliefs in bronze.
It served as cloak. To-day the natives of Yucatan wear the same dress, with but slight modifications. While the aborigines of the Tierra de Guerra, who still preserve the customs of their forefathers, untainted by foreign admixture, use the same garments, of their own manufacture, that we see represented in the bas-reliefs of Chichen and Uxmal, and in the mural paintings of Mayab and Egypt.
Hereabouts are placed also a small statue of the three-fold Hecate, a Diana found in the Giustiniani Palace at Rome; a bust of Jupiter, conjectured to be a copy from the work of the celebrated sculptor Polycletus, and a sphinx. Here, too, are some interesting bas-reliefs.
The statues were removed from their niches and pedestals, the bas-reliefs were torn from the walls, and the whole enormous collection was packed for transportation. Through an extraordinary change of affairs these treasures were conducted only as far as the Tiber.
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