its interest. But anyone who is acquainted
with the present state of our knowledge of Greek sculpture will not so
much feel called upon to refute such statements as to explain how so
strange a misconception could have arisen. Nor is the explanation very
far to seek. Mr. Ruskin was writing for a generation not yet penetrated
by the constructive criticism of recent investigation. Its conception of
"the antique" in art was based mainly on the mass of mechanical and
academic copies or imitations, of Graeco-Roman date, with which our
museums are filled, and on the influence of such sculpture to be seen in
the work of Flaxman or Thorwaldsen. It had, indeed, learnt from the
Elgin marbles that the Greek sculptors in the fifth century possessed a
nobility in their conception of the human form, a mastery in the
treatment of the nude and of drapery, and a skill in marble technique of
which only a faint reflection can be traced in the later Graeco-Roman
tradition; but the great statues in which the sculptors of the fifth
century embodied their ideals of the gods were either entirely lost or
preserved only in inadequate copies; and it is only in recent years that
the discovery of originals or the identification of trustworthy copies
has enabled us to appreciate the intensity of expression and of inner
life which distinguished the work of the great sculptors of the fourth
century, such as Scopas, Praxiteles, and Lysippus. Still, if Mr. Ruskin
had, like Brunn in his _Gotteridealen_, selected heads like those of the
Demeter of Cnidus or the Hera Farnese to illustrate his theme, instead
of a series of heads on coins magnified to many times the size for which
they were designed, he could hardly have written the passages just
quoted. But the second of those passages itself supplies us with another
clue. In this estimate of Greek sculpture there is throughout implied a
comparison with Christian, and above all with Florentine art, and its
desire to

"... bring the invisible full into play;
Let the visible go to the dogs; what matters?"

It is evident that the expression of the invisible, of character and
individuality, will be more striking and obvious in an art which lets
them "shine through the flesh they fray" than in the case of the Greek
sculptors whose respect and even passionate admiration for the human
body would not allow them thus to transfigure it, at least in their
statues of the gods, and led them to seek for subtler