Now if Pliny meant to say of Lysistratus that his method of modeling portraits by making a plaster figure or core, and covering the surface with wax, was older than that of casting in bronze, he was quite right; for undoubtedly the process of covering a core with wax must have preceded that of casting in bronze, or at least must have been coincident with it. But at the same time this method had previously been used only, or at least chiefly, in casting; whereas Lysistratus was the first to use it for modeling from life and carefully finishing every part. The process was old; the application was new. Thus far in considering this passage we have proceeded on the hypothesis that the “cera” spoken of was wax. But another and quite different view is also possible, and seems in all probability to be the correct one. Pliny may mean to refer to quite a different thing, and by the term “cera” may have meant not wax but color. “Ceræ” was the common term for a painter’s colors, and Pliny himself thus uses it in defining encaustic painting: “Ceris pingere et picturam inurere.” Varro also says, “Pictores locutulas magnas habent arculas ubi discolores sunt ceræ.” Statius also uses the same term when he says, “Apelleæ cuperent te scribere ceræ.” Anacreon, in his odes, constantly uses κηρός for picture; as, for instance,— Ἔρωτα κήρινόν τις Νεηνίης ἐπώλει. Here it is not a waxen figure, but a wax, or oil,—that is, a painting of Eros, not an ἀγάλμα. And in the same ode the youth replies in Doric, “Οὐκ εἰμὶ κηροτέχνης”—“I am not a painter;” or even more manifestly in the ode beginning,— Ἄγε ζωγράφων ἄριστε, γράφε, ζωγράφων ἄριστε, Ῥοδίης κοίρανε τέχνης, ἀπεοῦσαν, ὡς ἂν εἴπω, γράφε τὴν ἐμὴν ἑταίρην. γράφε μοι τρίχας τὸ πρῶτον ἁπαλάς τε καὶ μελαίνας· ὁ δὲ κηρὸς ἂν δύνηται, γράφε καὶ μύρου πνεούσας. And again,— ἀπέχει· Βλέπω γὰρ αὐτήν. τάχα, κηρὲ, καὶ λαλήσεις. Wax was the common medium used by painters. After it had been purified and blanched, their colors were mixed with it just as ours are with oil; and in like manner, as we speak of painting in oils, they spoke of painting in wax. A head done in chalk would no more necessarily mean a head modeled in chalk or plaster, than “imaginem [or effigiem] cera expressam” would mean a likeness modeled in wax. The substances on which the ancients painted were wood, clay, plaster, stone, parchment, and perhaps canvas. The best painters, however, rarely painted on anything but tablets or panels. “Nulla gloria artificum est nisi eorum qui tabulas pinxere,” says Pliny (xxxv. 37). These panels were of wood; they were prepared for painting by spreading over them chalk or white plaster (gypsum), and on that account were called “λεύκωμα.” All the paintings on walls were also on plaster covered with a composition of chalk and marble dust, as is fully described by Vitruvius.[15]