EXAGGERATION AS AN ESTHETIC FACTOR. 827 



plied tliis measurement to twenty- seven profiles of statues of cele- 

 brated men, passing by all that could not be certainly identified, 

 and taking only those on which the name was engraved, and 

 which bore evident resemblance to the figures on their medals. 

 We likewise passed over mythological personages like Homer, 

 Sappho, and others, whose existence is not fully proved, and 

 kings whose features might have been idealized for the sake of 

 flattery. The angle thus determined measures from seven to 

 fifteen degrees on the master-works of ancient statuary, statues of 

 divinities and heroes. Of the twenty-seven human statues meas- 

 ured, five had angles of fifteen degrees or less, seven of between 

 fifteen and twenty degrees, eight of between twenty and thirty 

 degrees, and seven of thirty degrees and more. A small number 

 of these profiles, it will be observed, present angles not departing 

 greatly from those of the statues of the gods. We do not estab- 

 lish a mean from these, for we recognize that the sculptor may 

 have exaggerated in the case of subjects who presented marked 

 profiles. It can not be objected that the artist sought to idealize 

 these men of genius ; for the purest profiles are not those of the 

 most celebrated characters. Solon, Plato, and Socrates, who en- 

 joyed so great fame, appear to less advantage than Hermarchus, 

 Bias, and Epaphroditas, who were much less well known. 



We can obtain a more exact conception of the special charac- 

 teristic of these statues by comparing them with the figures in 

 Visconti's Iconographie Rojnaine. The Romans all had a very 

 convex nose with the root usually depressed ; and a tangent could 

 not be drawn from that point to the forehead, even if the projec- 

 tion of the sinus were neglected. Of fourteen persons examined, 

 only four had that line tangent to the forehead, while it was secant 

 on all the others. The Grecian bust, on the other hand, had it 

 tangent, with only two exceptions. Furthermore, the angle is 

 very open in the Roman busts, ranging from twenty-four to 

 forty-eight degrees. It appears, then, that the Greeks, like other 

 peoples, established their ideal type by starting with the real and 

 exaggerating certain qualities. 



In this study of exaggeration as an element of aesthetic art, I 

 make no criticism, but rather place myself in the position of those 

 artists who see in the ideal something beyond and above the real. 

 This conception has been assailed. In the eyes of many, the 

 artist should confine himself strictly to copying the real, and be 

 nothing but the inferior rival of the photograph — or rather, per- 

 haps, of the composite photograph, which gives the mean of the 

 features of several persons by fixing them upon a single sensitive 

 plate. When anthropologists recognize the merits of artists^ 

 canons, they regard them as the expression of the truth, because 

 they represent the mean proportions of a large number of in- 



