etti having purchased an
ancient Greek statue of the best period in Pentelic marble, greatly
mutilated, and wishing to repair it, could find nothing among the best
products of the Carrara quarries to match the marble in purity and
fineness of texture, and was therefore obliged to destroy another
Greek statue of inferior merit in order to get materials for the
restoration. From this combination he succeeded in producing the
sleeping figure known as the Barberini Faun, whose forcible abduction
by the Pontifical Government on the eve of its being sold to a German
prince, so preyed upon the mind of the cruelly-wronged sculptor, that
he took to his bed and died.

Very like Pentelic marble, but easily distinguishable, is the Marmor
Porinum, the Marmo Grechetto duro of the Italians. It is intermediate
in the quality of its grain between Parian and Pentelic marble, being
finer than the former and not so fine as the latter. The column in
front of the Church of Santa Maria Maggiore, removed by Paul V. in
1614 from the Basilica of Constantine, is composed of this species; as
well as the celebrated Torso Belvedere of the Vatican, found near the
site of the Theatre of Pompey, to which Michael Angelo traced much of
his inspiration, and which, as we learn from a Greek Inscription at
the base, was the work of the Rhodian sculptor Apollonios, who carved
the group of the "Farnese Bull."

Not unlike this Porine marble was the _Marmor Hymettium_ of the
ancients; but it was never a great favourite in Rome on account of its
large grain and dingy white colour, slightly tinged with green and
marked by long parallel dark gray veins of unequal breadth. The
metamorphic action was not sufficiently energetic to destroy the last
traces of organic matter and the original stratification of the rock;
and the crystallising force was not sufficiently exercised to allow of
the entire rearrangement of the whole of the particles so as to expel
the included impurities. This marble was not therefore fitted for
sculpture; but it could be used for certain architectural purposes and
for ornamentation. It used to be quarried extensively on Hymettus, the
well-known mountain of Attica, celebrated for the quantity and
excellence of its honey. The rock on which the aromatic flowers grew
in such profusion for the bees, did not, however, partake of the same
delightful quality. In working it a peculiar fetid odour of
sulphuretted hydrogen, somewhat like that of a stal