THE INDUSTRY OF ALU NATIONS.

This may be seen conversely in various ways. The best of the Yenuses ofPainting, are those of Titian, but they are good only as they are made expression-less and inane, while the very necessities of color give an undue prominency tothe voluptuous side of her character; on the other hand, there is a physicalpurity of expression inherent in the very necessities of marble, which adapted itto the Greek purpose of representing in human form something mysteriouslybeyond the human. It is singular, in the Tribune at Florence, to look up fromthe Yenus de Medici to the Yenuses of Titian. It is like glancing from Susannah,pure, shrinking, but full of womanly warmth and natural passion, to Ninon del’Enclos. In the same way, as the Venus is less successfully represented in paint-ing than in marble, so it is curious and important to observe that the figures ofChristianity are very imperfectly presented in marble, while they are quite perfectin painting. If the reader will remember, he will find that there are no greathistorical and satisfactory statues of Christ or the Saints, and for the reason, wethink, before stated.

Looking now at the subject, historically, with the intent of ascertaining ifSculpture was peculiarly the Art of Greece, and of an old civilization, what dowe find ?

We find in the first place, that no other nation has ever created a new stylein Sculpture; and, secondly, that success in Sculpture has been always in pro-portion to its reproduction of Greek subjects in a Greek spirit.

Old Home had no Sculpture worthy the name. It mistook the colossal forthe grand, and has left us various enormities in stone and bronze. When thegreat period of Painting arrived, in modern Italy, many of the chief artists beinguniversally accomplished men, could chisel statues in addition to painting. Weinstance Michael Angelo and Eaphael. The chief work of the latter in Sculptureis preserved in a church at Home, and has much of his sweetness and grace.The works of the former are distributed between Eome and Florence: and hisfame is, perhaps, greatest as a sculptor. His statues are among the remarkableworks of Art. He made allegorical works such as The Night and Morning. Butas successes they are not to be allowed. They are full of grandeur and grace.But they fail in the first element of imitative works: they tell no story. A Greekwould always recognize any image of any god he knew. A Christian, versed inthe legends, would recognize any saint, and of course the Christ and Madonna.But what observer would ever know what the figures upon the Sarcophagi in theFlorentine Chapel intended ? They are allegories in stone; so far as the purpose ofArt is concerned, they are vague, mental chimera in marble; they are, in truth,precisely what the imagination of the spectator chooses. In his Christian Sculp-tures, the Pietd in St. Peter’s, for instance, and others, there is a want of holy,spiritual elevation, a triumph of physical suffering over the might of mind, whichdegrades the subject. His best work in Sculpture is the sitting statue of theMedici (the name escapes us), in the Florence chapel. But that is wroughtstrictly in the Greek spirit, that is to say, in a spirit of simplicity and truthful-ness, aiming to give a portrait of the man. There is nothing essentially different,except it may be as a matter of mere detailed work, in the statue of that Medicifrom the old statue of Demosthenes. So far, it is only an imitation, or at least areproduction. The Bacchus , in the Uffizi Gallery at Florence, is a Greek subject,treated, therefore, and instinctively, in the Greek manner, and is so far successful,that it might be accounted a genuine old Greek sculpture. Michael Angelo’s suc-cess in sculpture was in proportion to his following the Greek. When he de-parted from this law, he fell into an obscurity of which he seems to have been,himself, conscious, as may be seen in the fact that his other great works aremostly unfinished. It is as if he felt that he had not succeeded; as if he, whowas really subject to the new inspiration, were struggling to express himself inthe forms of the old, and was therefore compelled to leave the results incomplete.That which he failed to do in stone, however, he did triumphantly in color; andthe Sistine Chapel atones for that of Florence. The Prophets are as grand, in ahigher kind, as the Phidian Jupiter.

After Michael Angelo, came Bernini, who merely caricatured him. Then,after many years, Canova, who was simply and purely an imitator of the Greeks,to whose spirit he added an Italian sentimentality, both in choice of subject andtreatment. He is of no especial account in the history of Sculpture, except thathe returned much more nearly to the Greek purity of form than any of his pre-decessors. Just after Oanova came Thorwaldsen, and before his death, Powers.There were of course other men who pursued Sculpture, producing busts andstatues, and succeeding, both in making pleasing figures and in securing atemporary reputation. The German Schadow is to be mentioned honorablyamong them.

Now, in walking through the studios of Sculpture for the last hundred years,what do we find? We find Greek subjects, mythological and historical, treatedin the Greek way. How much would the spectator infer from such a view thatthe world had actually advanced about two thousand years in time, and into anentirely new spirit of Life and Society ? Is there any thing in all those studiosthat could not have been wrought infinitely better, in the old Greece of History ?

There are some exceptions to this statement; but they are of the kind thatonly confirm it. Thus it may be asserted, that the Christ and Apostles of Thor-

waldsen are certainly not Greek. But the question is, Does this group satisfy themind to the degree that the same subject in Painting, does it ? For instance, is itso adequate to the theme, so full of the peculiar spirit of Christianity, as Lionardoda Yinci’s painting of the Last Supper ? Gould it be so adequate ? Is it not limitedby the very nature of the art and of the material in which the work is wrought ?What are Thorwaldsen’s greatest works ? The Triumph of Alexander , the Mer-cury, Jason's Conquest of the Golden Fleece , the Night and Morning , the Gany-mede, and the Christ and Apostles. But, while the Greek subjects are only infe-rior to the original Greek in simple grandeur, for no sculpture has yet rivalled theElgin Marbles, the Christian is inadequate. And it.is so, as we believe, becauseSculpture is an art peculiar to the spirit of Greek civilization, and therefore per-fected by the nation of which it was the just expression. Thorwaldsen, in model-ling Christian subjects, merely obeyed the spirit of the time in which he lived.His feeling and inspiration, like his material and success, were Greek.

If we consider the group of Christ and the Apostles, now exhibited in modelat the Crystal Palace (the originals stand in the church of Notre Dame in Copen-hagen), we shall find that their excellence is an excellence peculiar to Sculpture,but very limited. The chief figure is not successful: it is colossal, which is anerror, because the sense of spiritual superiority is lost in the unnaturally giganticproportions. The attention, as is necessary in the very nature of Sculpture, isdiverted to th eform, to the external, while the success sought is internal and spir-itual. The figures of the Apostles have an unavoidable stiffness, arising from thenecessities of regular grouping. Sculpture does not allow that distribution whichwas essential to the subject. Compare with this, again, the Last Supper. In thesculpture the face and attitude of each Apostle are symbolical so far as is possible.But in this the Sculptor has only followed the tradition of Painting, and, by reason ofhis material, has lost much of the effect intended. John and Paul, the body and soulof the Christian law, are more perfect in many pictures than in this Sculpture.

The result seems to be that Thorwaldsen has done the best he could do underthe circumstances, but that the greatest success was impossible with such means.He has only copied in marble what already exists more perfectly in color; and ithas not been attempted in marble before, because, with a new sentiment in civili-sation, a new and more pliable, and therefore more adequate, form of art wasintroduced. What success he has achieved is Greek. The purity of form, thepropriety of action and the simplicity of expression, are Greek. But they areonly Greek.

If we turn to the works of Powers, we must confess that his great andundoubted excellence is that of the old Greek Sculpture. He shows a fineness ofdetail, an elegant elaboration, which is not often found in the antique, whichis the result of Yankee shrewdness and mastery of the means, working uponreceived models. Powers’s great works are all represented at the Crystal Palace:the GreeTc Slone, the Fke, the Fisher Boy , the Proserpine. He has an Americaand a California under his hands in Florence. The extreme beauty of these fig-ures, their delicate grace, and the exquisite refinement of their execution, are mat-ters of the history of Art. They are much superior to the statues of Canova, notonly in workmanship, but in purity of feeling. There is something meretriciousin the works of Canova, which the least thoughtful observer detects. Whatis to be said of his Venus f What of the Graces ? What of the Eehe ? Theyare ballet-girls and dames du theatre. They are not the visible forms of an idealgrace. The works of Powers have a naturalness which is strictly Greek. Theyare figures of still life. They represent no passion, no variety, no action of anykind. The face of the Greek Slave is pure and passionless. It is as beautiful asthe usual type of the Greek faces; but it has not the subtle and searching beautyof the Clytie. It is external in sentiment, if we may say so. It is a delicate andsuccessful imitation in marble of a young female form. But it is no more. Thechain upon the wrist does not make the figure a slave. We look in the face, notat the hands, of a slave, to feel the shame and the indignation. It was Byron’simagination which saw the rare vision he has immortalized as arising from thespectacle of the Dying Gladiator. The stone only represents a man, woundedand falling. If you call him a gladiator, and remember what the fortune and fateof a gladiator were, then you will feel as Byron sang. But such vague and gen-eral suggestions are to be regarded, in respect of the success of a work of art, onlyas the imaginary completion of the Yatican Torso. Michael Angelo, looking atthe Torso, may imagine it perfected into the full image of a God; but it is nottherefore correct to say that the Torso is the statue of a God. The truth is, thatthe sculptor who made the Gladiator, even if he intended a gladiator, which is amatter of grave doubt, did not mean all that a vivid imagination could supply,unless it be asserted that every work means all that it can mean to any mind.This may be true in strict esthetics, but it is not practically correct, because, insuch a case, the old Byzantine Madonnas must be considered equal successes inart with the Madonnas of Eaphael. By such a rule, also, the face of Powers’sEve must be admitted to a triumph as complete as the face of the Sistine Madon-na, for they are undoubtedly both intended to represent beautiful women.

Detailed criticism upon the sculptures of the Crystal Palace is rendered some-what unnecessary by the general principles we have suggested. They will, wethink, be found fully to justify those principles. If we turn from Powers and