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Porphyrites, Porphyry

Ch. 1: Pantarbes Page of 453 Porphyrites, Porphyry Text size:minus plus Restore normal size   Mail page  Print this page
PORPHYRITES.                                    285
PORPHYRITES: Porphyry.
An igneous rock of dark-crimson ground thickly dotted with small crystals of felspar. Though there are other colours of precisely the same stone, as far as its chemical composition goes, yet the ancient Porphyrites, " purple stone," designated exclusively the first-named kind. It took also the epithet Leptopsephos from its speckled texture. Egypt alone produced it in Pliny's age, and in masses of sufficient dimensions for the largestworks. But under the Lower Empire the Romans obtained an inexhaustible supply of the finest material from nearer home ; Valéry observed on the coast of Sardinia vast quarries of Porphyry with shafts of columns lying about, merely roughed out as they were left by the workmen. The earliest works in it seen at Rome were statues of Claudius brought from Egypt by his deputy Vitrasius Pollio, a novelty, which Pliny remarks, was not received with approbation, at least no one had up to that time followed his example.
Under the Lower Empire, however, it was largely employed in the most sumptuous edifices then erected, in the form of columns of labra for the baths, and of sarcophagi. Some of these columns, in a single piece 42 ft. long, are still to be seen fulfilling their original destination (having mostly been destroyed for the sake of the material), in the portico to Constantine's Baptistery at Rome, and in the mosque of Sta. Sophia. It was a fashionable material for the lower parts of the later imperial busts, having the head alone in white marble or bronze, its colour aptly reproducing the sovereign purple (a dark crimson dye). Those ages have left to us certain works in Porphyry, the exe­cution of which remains a mystery : perhaps the most wonderful things the Roman sculptor ever produced, considering the elabor-
Ch. 1: Pantarbes Page of 453 Porphyrites, Porphyry
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