This almost universal use of colour--a relic of very ancient art--has really decided the fate of Spanish sculpture. For some centuries public taste was firmly decided in condemning statue colourisation as “an offence against good taste.” It is held that the true purpose of sculpture is to depict form, and that painting an image in relief is barbarous and shows a want of culture, because the sculptor, attentive alone to the beauties of form, should observe the limits set by the material in which he has to work, and should resist the seductions of colour which belong to the painter. Coloured statues have even been compared with the wax figures displayed in shows. There is much to be said on both sides of the question. We shall not here try to answer it, for to do so would be to anticipate all that we hope to establish of the beauty of the polychrome statuary of Spain. Rather we would ask the reader to look now at the illustrations at the end of this volume. Great works are the only answer that can silence criticism. Those who have condemned polychrome sculpture have, almost without exception, instanced its worst examples. This is absurd; it is like giving a judgment of painting by the pictures exhibited each year in the Royal Academy of London. It must be remembered that polychrome statuary is a very ancient art; moreover, it is a perfectly natural and spontaneous development, growing out of the need for intensified expression. It was not an arbitrary practice adopted as “a trick of the trade.” This is important. Those who deny the use of colour to the sculptor have tried to prove that among the Greeks sculpture was anterior to painting, and that in the case of certain statues which we find coloured the painting was an injury added at a later date. This is entirely erroneous, as M. Marcel Dieulafoy proves by referring to the recent excavations made in Greece and Italy. The most ancient of the statues carved by the Greeks were those on which pigments were used. Carved out of wood, which lent itself readily to encrustations of bronze, ivory, and precious stones, as well as of colour, the figures were enriched in this way to give them a closer relation to life. Such was the bas-relief at Olympia in the Treasury of the Megarians, which represents a combat between Herakles and Acheloss, where the figures are carved out of cedar-wood richly embellished with gold; or the group of the Dioscuri, attributed by Pausanias to Dépoinos and Skyllis, where again the figures were enriched with films of ebony and of ivory placed upon the wood.