The frontispiece attempts to suggest what the
coloring of the Parthenon was like, and thus to illustrate the
general scheme of Doric polychromy. The colors used were chiefly
dark blue, sometimes almost black, and red; green and yellow also
occur, and some details were gilded. The coloration of the
building was far from total. Plain surfaces, as walls, were
unpainted. So too were the columns, including, probably, their
capitals, except between the annulets. Thus color was confined to
the upper members--the triglyphs, the under surface (soffit) of
the cornice, the sima, the anta-capitals (cf. Fig. 54), the
ornamental details generally, the coffers of the ceiling, and the
backgrounds of sculpture. [Footnote: Our frontispiece gives the
backgrounds of the metopes as plain, but this is probably an
error] The triglyphs, regulae, and mutules were blue; the taenia
of the architrave and the soffit of the cornice between the
mutules with the adjacent narrow bands were red; the backgrounds
of sculpture, either blue or red; the hawk's-beak molding,
alternating blue and red; and so on.
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