352 The Evolution of Sculpture. 



reliefs found at Sparta, which were plainly copied from 

 wooden originals. That the xoana were rude, stiff, and 

 expressionless we know. Perhaps they were enlivened by 

 being painted. At all events, they served to enable the con- 

 sciousness of the invisible to fix itself to form, and that is 

 the purpose of all art. A great change took place in 

 Greek art somewhere about the year 600 B. c. It appears 

 to have been about that time that two new materials and 

 several new processes came into use. The materials were 

 bronze and stone ; the processes were beating and casting 

 for the former, hewing and sawing for the latter. Of 

 course all these processes had been known elsewhere long 

 before that ; indeed, they had been known, most of them, in 

 Greece itself, but not by the Greeks. Eor them they were 

 lost arts recovered. It is at present impossible to say 

 whether the bronze or the stone statues are of more ancient 

 date. It is certain, however, that bronze-beating preceded 

 bronze-casting. The oldest bronze statues were formed of 

 sheets nailed or riveted together, and some of the earliest 

 stone statues bear evidences of having been copied from 

 originals of beaten bronze. A great technical advance was 

 made when the arts of casting in bronze and of sawing 

 marble into blocks were discovered. From that time on 

 sculpture, and statuary in the narrower sense, steadily pro- 

 gressed. Advancing skill goes hand in hand with advanc- 

 ing life and advancing thought. The spirit of freedom that 

 now stirs in Greece shows itself at once in all the arts. The 

 very gods renew their form and become beautiful as well 

 as strong. It was a saying of Plato's that the state is but 

 the individual man writ large. We may reverse this and 

 say that in these times the individual statue, with its bal- 

 ance and proportion of life, is simply the ordered state of 

 freedom writ small. Just in proportion as Greece advances 

 in true freedom, her sculpture gains life and beauty ; yea, 

 and when freedom dies, sculpture dies; all the arts die. 

 True art is always the expression of freedom, because it is 

 the expression of man's spiritual nature, and that is free- 

 dom. 



Enough still remains to us of Greek art to show by what 

 steps it passed from the rude stone block to the finished 

 art of Phidias. These steps are better presented to the eye 

 than to the ear. 



There is, however, one important series of steps that can 

 not be presented for want of material. It is characteristic 



