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Updated: May 19, 2025
The statue of the Olympian Jupiter by Phidias was considered the highest achievement of this department of Grecian art. It was of colossal dimensions, and was what the ancients called "chryselephantine;" that is, composed of ivory and gold; the parts representing flesh being of ivory laid on a core of wood or stone, while the drapery and other ornaments were of gold.
At the same time even such information as they give us is welcome, since it aids our imagination to reconstruct the appearance of the whole. These great chryselephantine statues were placed within the cella of a temple, lighted only through the door and by some infiltration through the marble roof, and their effect was calculated for these conditions.
They were acquainted with the arts of dyeing and incrusting ivory, and they also possessed some splendid specimens of chryselephantine statuary. Ancient writers, indeed, mention no fewer than one hundred statues of gold and ivory; but they furnish us with no particulars of the mode of executing these colossal monuments of art in a substance which could only be obtained in small pieces.
The chryselephantine papal standard rises high, surrounded by pennons of the civic flag. The van of the procession appears headed by John Howard Parnell, city marshal, in a chessboard tabard, the Athlone Poursuivant and Ulster King of Arms.
Chryselephantine sculpture began in Crete. Among the earliest of the Greek sculptors whose names have come down to us was Canachos, the Sicyonian. His masterpiece was the Apollo Philesios, in bronze, made for the temple of Didymas.
It was a young woman in silvery satins of a Renascence design; she had golden hair in two long shining ropes, and a face so startingly pale between them that she might have been chryselephantine made, that is, like some old Greek statues, out of ivory and gold. But her eyes were very bright, and her voice, though low, was confident. "Father Brown?" she said. "Mrs Boulnois?" he replied gravely.
The Greeks who were acquainted with it at least as early as the time of Homer gradually introduced ivory as a material for sculpture. In certain forms of combination with gold, it gave origin to the art of chryselephantine sculpture, so called from the Greek primitives, gold and ivory.
The statues, by Archias's orders, were to be executed in chryselephantine work, and the gold and ivory which this required might only too easily awaken the vice of cupidity in the honest and frugal Biamites. So nothing could be done about it, not to mention the fact that he was forbidden, on pain of being sold to work in a stone quarry, to open the studio to any one without his master's consent.
His taste was trained, his range wide too wide, one is tempted to add; and thus by a conscious act of the will he originated an art that recalls an antique chryselephantine statue, a being rigid with precious gems, pasted with strange colours, something with mineral eyes without the breath of life contemporary life yet charged with its author's magnetism, bearing a charmed existence, that might come from a cold, black magic; monstrous, withal possessing a strange feverish beauty, as Flaubert's Salammbô is beautiful, in a remote, exotic way.
It was of the sort called CHRYSELEPHANTINE, a kind of work said to have been invented by Phidias in which ivory was substituted for marble in those parts which were uncovered, while the place of the real drapery was supplied with robes and other ornaments of solid gold. Its height, including the base, was nearly 40 feet.
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