ed and executed in the marble, and their art has come out of the
stone without interposition of other material, even as the figures which
Michelangelo chopped, living and colossal, direct out of the block.[15]

[Footnote 15: Interesting details in Vasari's treatise, and in his
Lives of J. della Quercia, Ferrucci, and other sculptors.]

The Greek, therefore, was a moulder of clay, a caster of bronze, in the
early time when the art acquires its character and takes its direction;
in that period, on the contrary, the Tuscan was a chaser of silver, a
hammerer of iron, above all a cutter of stone. Now clay (and we must
remember that bronze is originally clay) means the modelled plane and
succession of planes smoothed and rounded by the finger, the imitation
of all nature's gently graduated swellings and depressions, the absolute
form as it exists to the touch; but clay does not give interesting light
and shade, and bronze is positively blurred by high lights; and neither
clay nor bronze has any resemblance to the texture of human limbs or
drapery: it gives the form, but not the stuff. It is the exact reverse
with marble. Granulated like a living fibre, yet susceptible of a delicate
polish, it can imitate the actual substance of human flesh, with its
alternations of opacity and luminousness; it can reproduce, beneath
the varied strokes of the chisel, the grain, running now one way, now
another, which is given to the porous skin by the close-packed bone
and muscle below. Moreover, it is so docile, so soft, yet so resistant,
that the iron can cut it like butter or engrave it lightly like agate;
so that the shadows may pour deep into chasms and pools, or run over the
surface in a network of shallow threads; light and shade becoming the
artist's material as much as the stone itself.

The Greek, as a result, perceived form not as an appearance, but as a
reality; saw with the eye the complexities of projection and depression
perceivable by the hand. His craft was that of measurements, of minute
proportion, of delicate concave and convex--in one word, of _planes_.
His dull, malleable clay, and ductile, shining bronze had taught him
nothing of the way in which light and shadow corrode, blur, and pattern
a surface. His fancy, his skill, embraced the human form like the gypsum
of the moulder, received the stamp of its absolute being. The beauty he
sought was concrete, actual, the same in all lights and from all points
of view: the