It was in Spain that the art of polychrome lived and developed. The finest of her coloured statues were wrought in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and also in the beginning of the eighteenth centuries, a period when the practice was dead in almost all other countries. For this reason, even if for no other, Spanish carvings claim the attention of the student of art. They are the crown of what has been achieved by earlier civilisations. What was it that kept Spain alone faithful to the old method of using colour as well as form to give life to her statues? First, a respect for tradition which has marked all things in this strong and stubborn race. Then the Spanish carvers were in very close connection with Mudéjar architecture, which was closely allied with the art of Persia, in which colour ruled with such supreme insistence, and whose whole strength lay in ornamentation. But deeper even than these outer reasons was the Spanish character, which expressed itself in their altar carvings and in their statues. The one thing the Spanish artist sought for first was the reality of life; and this life was religious life, for in Spain the divine life was not separate--a thing detached--but a real living part of the human daily life of the people. The painted statues were at once more life-like and spoke a more real language to the people, than figures chiselled in white stone. The statuary of Spain was not wrought, in the first place, to fulfil claims of art, but to satisfy the needs of the people. It is still in the convents and churches of Spain--not in the museums, if we except the museums of Valladolid and Seville--that the masterpieces of polychrome statuary remain. It is there that we must seek them.[B] CHAPTER II EARLY SCULPTURE BELONGING TO THE NATIVE IBERIAN, LATIN, BYZANTINE, AND VISIGOTHIC PERIODS The beginnings of sculpture in Spain take us back to the middle years of the fifth century B.C. It is to this date, about 440 B.C., that the beautiful sculptured bust of the Lady of Elche belongs. The figure was discovered in August 1897 at Elche, one of the most ancient and interesting of the old towns of Spain. Situated in the beautiful ravine of the Vinalapó, twelve miles distant from Alicante, Elche still retains almost unaltered its Arab character. It was the Roman Ilice, and probably the Iberian Helike, where Hamilcar was defeated. The town is especially fortunate in having possessed this treasure, which speaks so splendidly of the power and strength of Spain’s ancient art. This is the earliest and by far the most important of the antique statues of Spain--the one supreme example of primitive Iberian work. But alas! the Lady of Elche has been taken out of Spain and is now in the Louvre at Paris.