606 CLASSICAL ART 



the individual styles of numerous artists great and small. The reader 

 would learn to know Myron, Phidias and Polyclitus, Scopas, Prax- 

 iteles and Lysippus, more fully and certainly than we can know 

 Donatello and Michelangelo. The influence of each of these great 

 masters upon his fellow sculptors, his pupils and successors, would be 

 disclosed. And scores of other sculptors of varying degrees of genius 

 would receive adequate treatment. All this of course would be done 

 with the help of illustrations, which would present to the eye a long 

 gallery of statues and reliefs, each piece complete in form and color 

 as when it left the master's hand. 



How far we are from possessing any such history of Greek sculpture 

 as this every beginner knows. Of the necessary materials for such 

 a work only a small fraction exists. Instead of full and authoritative 

 literary documents we have the brief and unintelligent summary com- 

 piled by the elder Pliny, the scattered notices in Pausanias and other 

 writers, chiefly of Roman imperial date. notices often vague, and 

 only in the rarest cases penetrating and precise, and finally some 

 hundreds of inscriptions giving names of sculptors, occasionally with 

 one or two additional particulars, but mostly referring to works of 

 which not a vestige remains. However, as literary documents are 

 of only minor importance to the historian of art. our poverty in this 

 matter could be made light of. were the works themselves preserved 

 to tell their story to one skilled to decipher it. But in truth the actual 

 remains of the finest Greek sculpture are exceedingly scanty. Of 

 grave reliefs and votive reliefs and sculptures used as decorations for 

 temples and mausoleums we have, to be sure, a great many, though 

 in a mutilated condition. But of independent sculptures in the round, 

 such as statues of divinities, of athletes, statesmen, and men of let- 

 ters, we have from the best period very few. The masterpieces on 

 which the fame of the greatest sculptors rested are without exception 

 lost, and we are fortunate when one of them can be identified in a 

 ropy or copies of Roman date. Copies, in fact, executed during the 

 century preceding and the two centuries following the beginning of 

 the Christian Era. constitute a large part of our monumental testi- 

 mony to the history of Greek sculpture. That we have them is the 

 chief reason why we know the art of Pnlyclitus or Praxiteles more 

 fully than we may hope to know the art of Polygnotus or Apelles. 



The historian of Greek sculpture, having these materials at his 

 disposal, ought to base his views as to the artistic style or styles of 

 a given time and place primarily upon extant original works of that 

 time and place, including every class of artistic remains, sculp- 

 tures, paintings, coins, gems. in short, all surviving products of the 

 graphic and plastic arts. Into the framework thus obtained he must 

 fit those lost works which he re-creates in imagination from copies. 

 Where trustworthy evidence fails, as it often does, he must perforce 



