278 Dr. Charles Waldstein [April 13, 



It was here that the Greek people and the Greek artist had their 

 feeling for the human form, its manifestations of strength and perfect 

 proportion, aroused and developed. In the athletic games, to which a 

 moral, nay even a religious importance was attached, victory, which 

 brought glory to the victor and was the pride of his community, was 

 based upon the perfection of the human body, the force and normal 

 development of all the organs, flexibility and dexterity of movement, 

 which the early artist failed to render in his statues, and with 

 regard to which the sense of the public at large seemed compara- 

 tively blunt. It was here, with hundreds of nude youths, not only 

 wrestling, jumping, and running, but endeavouring by systematic 

 practice to remedy any defect or abnormality in any one limb or 

 organ, that the artist day by day studied his anatomy of the human 

 figure without the need of entering the dissecting-room or calling in 

 the help of the anatomist. And when once the artist was called 

 upon to commemorate by means of his art the outward form of the 

 athlete whose perfect development gained him the glory of victory 

 and monumental fame, we can then see how the sculptor was led 

 away from the conventional archaic types of gods down to nature in 

 living, active, and well-formed man. 



All this more or less a priori reasoning makes it most probable 

 that the j^a-l^stra was the most important agent in bringing Greek 

 art down to nature in the fifty years marking the " period of trans- 

 ition." An actual examination of the facts and a careful study of 

 Greek art with this question before the mind, give the most conclusive 

 evidence of the supreme influence exercised by the games and the 

 palicstra. I cannot hoj)e in this short address to place before you all 

 the instances bearing upon this subject which I have collected for the 

 last four years, and which have shown me conclusively that we must 

 ascribe to the palaestra the chief influence in freeing Greek art from 

 its conventional trammels. On the other hand I do not mean to 

 appeal to your faith in my personal statement ; but I believe that the 

 instances which I am able to place before you in diagrams and casts 

 will sufiice to illustrate and support the points to which I shall draw 

 your attention. Still I feel bound to inform you that the choice of 

 these special instances has often been guided by mere convenience 

 and readiness of access, and that in many cases, as with some of the 

 vases, the diagrams were made for other purposes ; and thus it cannot 

 be said that I have chosen but a few instances happening to prove 

 my generalisations. 



From the most general point of view, we must be struck by the 

 fact that the Greeks, the one people in antiquity whose art is possessed 

 of nature, were also the one people with whom athletic games were 

 a national institution, wide spread and part of daily life. I have 

 endeavoured to show elsewhere how this fact as well as the plastic 

 predisposition of the Greek race was a necessary outcome of the 

 fundamental characteristics of the race and their physical and social 

 surroundings, and to point out that Oriental nations and those living 



