Book contents
- Seeing Color in Classical Art
- Seeing Color in Classical Art
- Copyright page
- Dedication
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- Chapter 1 Material Color, Language, and Khrōma
- Chapter 2 Additive Colors, Kosmēsis, and Care
- Chapter 3 Khōra, Relief, AND Landscape
- Chapter 4 Inlaid Eyes, Effluences, and Opsis
- Chapter 5 Atoms, Lithoi, and Animacy
- Epilogue
- Select Bibliography
- Index
Chapter 4 - Inlaid Eyes, Effluences, and Opsis
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 25 November 2022
- Seeing Color in Classical Art
- Seeing Color in Classical Art
- Copyright page
- Dedication
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- Chapter 1 Material Color, Language, and Khrōma
- Chapter 2 Additive Colors, Kosmēsis, and Care
- Chapter 3 Khōra, Relief, AND Landscape
- Chapter 4 Inlaid Eyes, Effluences, and Opsis
- Chapter 5 Atoms, Lithoi, and Animacy
- Epilogue
- Select Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Approaching the bronze statue of a naked male figure from the left, a beholder encounters the uncanny sight of an eye looking out from a socket cast into its head (Figure 104). Anatomical parts of the eye have been pieced together from polychrome materials: white bone for the white, a pink vitreous paste for the tear duct at the inner corner, a ring of black surrounding a thicker brown ring for the iris, and at the center a void where a pupil would once have been inlaid.1 Only the tear duct alters the symmetry of these concentric circles, decreasing in diameter to the pupil point – white, black, brown, black again – like a target. A sheet of bronze enfolds the back of the eye to hold its parts together; at the front, this bronze sheeting has been sliced into lashes that curl away from the eye and frame it.2 The eye does not move or contract as a beholder approaches; however, brilliance, hues, and variegation form and animate it.
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- Information
- Seeing Color in Classical ArtTheory, Practice, and Reception, from Antiquity to the Present, pp. 182 - 237Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2022