Traces of painting on various architectural members were found by Cockerell, but they were too much faded for the colours to be distinguished. The designs are the usual Greek patterns— the fret, the honeysuckle, and the egg and dart.
The sculpture is of the greatest interest, as being designed to decorate one of the finest buildings in the Peloponnesus in the latter half of the 5th century B.C.
The frieze, now in the British Museum, is complete; it is nearly IoI ft. long by 2 ft. high, carved in relief on twenty-three slabs of marble 44 to 5 in. thick. The subjects are the battle of the Lapithae and the Centaurs, and that between the Amazons and the Greeks, the two favourite subjects in Greek art of the best period. They are designed with wonderful fertility of invention, and life-like realism and spirit ; the composition is arranged so as to form a series of diagonal lines or zigzags Ai , thus forming a pleasing contrast to the unbroken horizontal lines of the cornice and architrave. The various groups are skilfully united by some dominant line or action, so that the whole subject forms one unbroken composition.
The relief is very high,more than 3-1 in. in the most salient parts, and the whole treatment is quite opposite to that of the Parthenon frieze, which is a very superior work of art to that at Bassae. Many of the limbs are quite detached from the ground; the drill has been largely used to emphasize certain shadows, and in many places, for want of due calculation, the sculptor has had to cut into the flat background behind the figures. From this it would appear that no finished clay-model was prepared but that the relief was sculptured with only the help of a drawing. The point of sight, more than 20 ft. below the bottom of the frieze, and the direction in which the light fell on it have evidently been carefully considered. Many parts, invisible from below, are left
comparatively rough. The workmanship throughout is unequal, and the hands of several sculptors can be detected. On the whole, the execution is not equal to the beauty of the design, and the whole frieze is somewhat marred by an evident desire to pro duce the maximum of effect with the least possible amount of labour—very different from the almost gem-like finish of the Parthenon frieze. Even the design is inferior to the Athenian one; most of the figures are ungracefully short in their proportions, and there is a great want of refined beauty in many of the female hands and faces. It is in the fire of its varied action and its subtlety of expression that this sculpture most excels. The noble movements of the heroic Greeks form a striking contrast to the feminine weakness of the wounded Amazons, or the struggles with teeth and hoofs of the brutish Centaurs; the group of Apollo and Artemis in their chariot is full of grace and dignified power. The marble in which this frieze is sculptured is somewhat coarse and crystalline; the slabs appear not to have been built into their place but fixed afterwards, with the aid of two bronze bolts driven through the face of each.
Of the metopes, which were 2 ft. 8 in. square, only one exists nearly complete, with eleven fragments ; the one almost perfect has a relief of a nude warrior, with floating drapery, overcoming a long-haired bearded man, who sinks vanquished at his feet. The relief of these is rather less than that of the frieze figures, and the work is nobler in character and superior in execution.