566 HISTORY OF ART 



tinent." The field of classical art is, to be sure, no pent-up Utica; but 

 one has in it at least the comfortable feeling of seeing boundaries. It 

 is also easier to formulate conceptions and methods as to the study of 

 the history of classical art than as to classical art itself. We have 

 something tangible, an historical study. 



A recent writer of a stimulating book entitled The Spirit and 

 Principles of Greek Sculpture has filed a mild protest against the 

 historical treatment of Greek sculpture. "All their books," he says, 

 " follow the historic development. They are histories of ancient 

 artists." And yet we find the author himself following in general the 

 same historical development of Greek sculpture as his predecessors, 

 the "scientific archaeologists," as he somewhat disparagingly calls 

 them. The natural excuse of these scientific archaeologists is that no 

 art was ever so clearly a natural development with a birth, a growth 

 to maturity, and a decline, as Greek sculpture. If we try to give an 

 orderly description of it we naturally make it a history. It is true that 

 about three quarters of Winckelmann's great History of Ancient Art 

 is not in the form of history, but is rather a tender, loving rhapsody, 

 ever held in check, over the objects taken singly and in the order of 

 his liking, an order with which one need find no fault; and then fol- 

 lows about one quarter called The History of Ancient Art in Relation 

 to External Circumstances among tJte Greeks, which deals with the 

 subject chronologically. Brunn, on the other hand, wrote a History 

 of Greek Sculptors apart from any description and estimate of their 

 works. But in later times, in Germany, France, England, and Amer- 

 ica, it has become the custom to clothe the skeleton with flesh and 

 blood, and treat the works along with the workmen. One will hardly 

 abandon the form of Collignon's History of Greek Sculpture to go back 

 to Winckelmann's arrangement. 



It is an interesting, one might say a fascinating, study to trace the 

 development of Greek sculpture from the almost formless Xikandni 

 statue to the Lemnian Athena and on to the Xike of Samothrace. 

 from the stiff "Apollos" to the Hermes of Praxiteles and the works 

 of Lysippos represented to us by the apoxyomcnos, apportioning as 

 we go, to each great sculptor, as far as we can, his share in the devel- 

 opment which came not of itself, but was brought about by men 

 whom we begin to know and honor as elemental forces. 



I foresee; that the subject will be large enough if I limit it once for 

 nil to Greek sculpture, and take as a subject the study of the history 

 of Greek sfulpture as the most prominent branch of the history of 

 Greek ait. The, world lias suffered no greater loss in art than the 

 wiping out of Greek painting. One might infer from Pliny that it was 

 almost, if not quite, as important and interesting as Greek sculp- 

 ture. 1 From his description it is clear that the great painters, Zeuxis. 

 1 The Laocoon group and the Pergamon altar frieze did not perhaps fall a whit 



