Ancient greeks are believed to be the culture that first used inscribed marble to mark their graves.
Why did the greeks use marble.
In many cases these marble replicas are particularly important to art historians as many of the bronze muses are no longer in existence.
The greeks and romans chose marble for their structures due its beauty.
Modern scholarship identifies three major stages in monumental sculpture in bronze and stone.
Limestone undergoes a process of recrystallization due to extreme pressure or temperature change to become marble.
It was then pulled from its source with the help of pulleys winches levers and wooden beams.
However the process of mining marble was quite lengthy.
Architectural sculpture was mostly marble ie statues stuck to the sides of buildings.
Hammers and wedges were used to release marble from the earth.
The sculpture of ancient greece is the main surviving type of fine ancient greek art as with the exception of painted ancient greek pottery almost no ancient greek painting survives.
The greeks certainly had a preference for marble at least for their public buildings.
At all periods there were great numbers.
Initially though wood would have been used for not only such basic architectural elements as columns but the entire buildings themselves.
The archaic from about 650 to 480 bc classical 480 323 and hellenistic.
As for the romans their buildings were mostly made out of brick however they so admired the aesthetics of marble from the ancient greek buildings that they would cover their brick buildings with a layer of marble for style.
Large works of the archaic period were more or less all made from stone.
Early greek sculpture was most often in bronze and porous limestone but whilst bronze seems never to have gone out of fashion the stone of choice would become marble.
The greeks often considered the best sculptors of antiquity favored marble and referred to it as shining stone marble occurs as a metamorphosis.
Early 8th century bce temples were so constructed and had thatch roofs.
The best was from naxos close grained and sparkling parian from paros with a rougher grain and more translucent and pentelic near athens more opaque and which turned a soft honey colour with age due to its iron content.
Gravestones statues and earth mounds were used to mark the grave and inscriptions were used to.