But Pliny himself contradicts the story of the four colours. In the instance of Apelles, how could the Venus Anadyomene, she who was rising from the _green_ or _azure_ ocean, under a bright _blue_ sky, have been painted with lamp-black, white chalk, ruddle, and yellow ochre only? Then Apelles lived after Zeuxis; and if Zeuxis painted grapes, whence got he the green and purple, if none but the four chaste, grave, and solemn colours were known? What becomes of the monochromes, which Pliny himself says preceded by far the time of Apelles, yet they were painted, according to him, with dragon’s blood, a pigment by no means resembling any of the four orthodox colours? But such instances occur at every page. I will point out one more, in which we have other authority for contradicting him besides his own. He tells us that Micon painted the temple of Theseus. Pausanias and others say the same. Now Micon was contemporary with Polygnotus, consequently, at least 150 years before Apelles’ time. Some of his pictures were painted flat on stucco within the temple; the rest were coloured bas-reliefs. But the stucco, though the traces of pictures and subjects are gone, retains the marks, or rather stains of the colours--so does the sculpture; and among those colours we find vestiges of bronze and gold-coloured arms, of a _blue_ sky, and of blue, green, and red drapery[234]. In the catacombs of Egypt, in times long anterior to the great painters of Greece, blues and greens are as commonly found as yellows and reds. In the ancient sepulchres of Etruria, blue and green are employed along with other colours, and sometimes capriciously enough, for there is a very conspicuous blue horse in one of the chambers. But we have an authority far above these. Moses expressly mentions the colours, scarlet, red, blue, and purple, when he describes the furniture of the ark of the covenant, and the vestments of the priests. With these facts before them, it appears incomprehensible that a single hasty expression of an author, however respectable, should have been dwelt upon and adopted almost as an article of faith by painters and critics in Italy, France, and England. If, instead of the expressions of Pliny, writers upon colours had adopted the words Plato puts into the mouth of Socrates about midway between the times of Polygnotus and Apelles, we should have had the orthodox number of colours increased to twelve. In the Phædo, in that last beautiful fable which Socrates relates to comfort his friends, just before he bathes and prepares to drink the poison, he tells of a world inhabited by the immortals, to whom the guidance of human affairs is given, as well as of a world prepared for the spirits of good men; and says, this superior “world, if surveyed from on high, appears like a globe covered with twelve skins, various and distinguished with colours, a pattern of which are the colours found among us, and which our painters use[235].”