On the Thermon Metopes

The principal series of metopes from Thermon has been familiar for so long that further discussion of them may seem unnecessary. I hope, however, that the following pages are justified by the collective result of the small observations which they contain, if not by any single one of these. There is little of a general nature to be said after Koch's excellent article in Ath. Mitt. , 1914. I. Chelidon and Aedon . ( Antike Denkmäler , ii., Pl. L, 1 (Soteriades). Photographs of details, Ath. Mitt. , 1914, Pls. XIII, XIV (Koch)). In the first place, a word as to the technique, the surprising elaborateness of which calls for more close attention than it has hitherto received. An interesting point is that the contours of the female flesh are drawn in bright red, the same as is used for the inscription, and for many details of dress. This use of red outlines for female flesh occurs, though not commonly, on Corinthian vases—on hydriae in the Louvre (E. 695) and in Dresden, where the faces and bodies of the sirens under the side handles are outlined in this way. It is found also in Attic vase painting—in two Sophilos fragments and in the fragment of similar style, from the Acropolis, with Pandrosos and Poseidon. The Corinthianising character of these has long been recognised, and the usage seems to be a subtlety which vase painters occasionally borrowed from the free painting of the time. On the other hand, male flesh in all the metopes is consistently outlined with black; the reason for the distinction is not easy to see, but it is possible that the artist was in search of equivalents for rendering the colours proper to the sexes—brown outlined with black for the male being used to balance white outlined with red for the female. In any case, the distinction was carefully maintained and was evidently felt to be significant

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