These great chryselephantine statues were placed within the cella of a temple, lighted only through the door and by some infiltration through the marble roof, and their effect was calculated for these conditions.

The rich tone and subtle reflections of the ivory and the gold, mingled with coloured inlays of enamel or precious stones, and tempered and harmonised by a "dim religious light," must have been most impressive; and the grandeur of the figures was enhanced by their colossal size.

But in all this we are still dealing only with conditions and accessories, not with the art itself and the religious ideals which it expressed.
These are perhaps easier for us to appreciate in the case of the Zeus than of the Athena, though we are better provided with copies of the latter.

We are accustomed in our own religious art to the attempt to express divinity in the form of a mature man of unspeakable majesty and benignity.

To the Greeks, indeed, the human figure of Zeus was not merely an incarnation, but the actual form of the god himself; the god was not thought of as having taken upon himself the sorrows and the weaknesses of our mortal nature, but as sharing only its ideal perfection.