There are branches of the art which the Greeks either did not study, or studied without success. They give little evidence of having been able to appreciate color or to understand its uses. They, as Ruskin says, painted anything anyhow--gods black, horses red, lips and cheeks white. They attained to a certain unsurpassable elegance of shape, and the beautiful outlines of their human-figure ornamentation can at times hardly be sufficiently admired; but their coloring was purely conventional, and its application but little understood. Its changes may be noticed with some curiosity. At first the favorite ground was a pale cream-color, which, later, turned to a redder tint, and human took the place of animal forms. The vases in what is called the “old style,” show black figures and ornamentation in monochrome, with the exception of female faces, which are white, and eyes red. The effects of perspective are only occasionally tried. White was used for the hair and beard of old men. Coming down next to the highest art of Greece, the ground is black, the figures red, and the ornamentation white. Specimens belonging to this period show advance chiefly in the drawing and expression. We remark further, that, besides the use of conventional colors, the Greeks did not care to copy nature too closely, and thus in two distinct ways showed their indifference or inability to introduce into their art the element of likeness. When Jacquemart says that “no natural object, be it plant, bird, or animal, is rendered in its real form, or in its intimate details,” he gives expression to a fact which shows the distinction between Greek ceramic art and that in which a nearer approach is made to similitude by the use of correct drawing and color. [Illustration: Fig. 12.--Japanese Hexagonal Vase. Deep blue ground. Figures in dark brown, three shades of green, and yellow. Height, 16½ in. (R. H. Pruyn Coll.)] [Illustration: Fig. 13.--Persian Tile. Arabesque Decoration.]