STATUARY IN THE GARDEN 
A Sympathetic Handling of the Origin and Proper Use of Sculpture as a 
Garden Adjunct and Ornament from a Well-known Sculptor’s Viewpoint 
HE statue, like the pergola, the bench, and other fur- 
nishings, is a mere accessory in the garden and should 
be kept strictly in its place, never being allowed to 
dominate the scene so completely as to distract the 
attention entirely from the flowers themselves. 
In the gardens of ancient Greece and Rome many of the 
lesser members of Jupiter’s numerous family — if not Jupiter 
himself — then first bodied forth in marble and bronze, took 
up, and long held, positions of honor. But, as the Golden 
Age lapsed into the obscure gloom of the Middle Ages, man- 
kind seemed to lose all interest in both the gods and their 
gardens. The latter fell into ruinous decay, and the former, 
if so fortunate as to fall into the safety of utter forget- 
fulness, merely bided their time. Their long and patient wait- 
ing was at last rewarded when the great gardens of the Renais- 
sance received them, a weary, broken company, into their 
bosoms. 
After a time the Renaissance petered out into the trivial 
formalities of decadence, and again the old gods were forgotten 
in the excesses of the Romantic rebellion which followed. 
The garden builders of the new movement were so frantic in 
their attempt to “get back to Nature” that they well nigh 
disgraced her, for instead of going to her directly they tried to 
come at her through the medium of the school of romantic 
landscape painters, and went about setting up dead trees and 
bringing old, mossy, half-rotten logs from the woods. They 
reached what to this later time seems the lowest possible depths, 
when they invented the painted cast iron effigies of the denizens 
of the forest and set them up amid their prostrate logs and life- 
less tree trunks, thinking that in reproducing such scenes as the 
painters chose to put upon their canvases they were paying 
Nature the highest possible compliment. 
It must be remembered that the old gods were no sort of kin 
to these startled deer, timid gazelles, and pointing hunting dogs. 
These are no more to be classed as sculpture than were the 
“waxworks” of the old Musee. They were not representations 
SAINT FRANCIS AMID THE FLOWERS 
Where, despite his ascetic garb, he seems thoroughly at home. His 
spirit, trafficking ever in beauty, lingers fitly in the gardens that he loved 
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