manacles and anklets of knotted snakes; and
throughout, instead of the calm impersonality of the Greek, dealing out
the typical forms of things like a law of Nature, we have the restless,
intense, partisan, modern man, not wanting in tenderness, but full of a
noble scorn at the unworthiness of the world, and grasping at a reality
beyond it. He is intent, first of all and at all risks, upon vivid
expression, upon telling the story, and speedily outruns the
possibilities of his material. He must make his creatures alive to the
last superficies; and as he cannot give them motion, he puts an emphasis
upon all their bones, sinews, veins, and wrinkles,--every feather is
carved, and even the fishes under the water show their scales. That
mere literalness is not the aim is shown by the open disregard of it
elsewhere; for instance, the size of each figure is determined, not by
natural rules, but by their relative importance, so that in the
Nativity, Mary is twice as large as Joseph and three times as large as
the attendants. And the detail is not everywhere equally minute, but
follows the intensity of the theme, reaching its height in the lower
compartment, where the damned are in suffering, and especially in the
figures of the fiends. This is no aim at literalness, but a struggle for
an emphasis beyond the reach of Sculpture,--taking these means in
despair of others, and, in its thirst for expression, careless alike of
natural probability, typical perfection of form, and pleasing effect.
Different as it seems, the same spirit is at work here and in Painting.
In both it is the repudiation of the classic ideal,--in Sculpture by a
_reductio ad absurdum_, putting its implicit claims to the test of
realization,--in Painting by mere negation, as was natural at the outset
of a new career, before the means of any positive expression were
discovered.

Ideal form was to the Greeks the highest result, the success of the
universe. The end of Art was conceived as Nature's end as well, whether
actually attained or not. Nor was this preference of certain forms
arbitrary, but it followed the plain indications written on every
particle of matter. What we call brute matter is whatever is means only,
not showing any individuality, or end within itself. A handful of earth
is definable only by its chemical or physical properties, which do not
distinguish it, but confound it with other things. By itself it is only
so much phosphate or silicate, and