idea: the
vertex of the triangle is filled by the floating figures of the gods,
who appear calm, beautiful, mysterious, showering down death from
inaccessible heaven. Will this do? Alas, much less than either of the
others. The arrangement would be beautiful if the triangle of the
gable, instead of being filled with a group of statues, were walled up,
plastered, and could be painted on in fresco. The colour, light and
shade, and perspective of painting, by creating a seeming depth of
back-ground, by hiding one figure partially behind another, so as to
make them appear not in actual contact, by piling up aetherial clouds or
waving light draperies, would permit the artist to show the Niobides on
solid ground below, and the gods in the air, high, distant above. But
the sculptor, without any such means, could only suspend Apollo and
Artemis (at tremendous expense of iron clamps) in such a way that
they should seem to be standing on the shoulders of the Niobides; or
interpose between them a thick bolster of marble clouds, a massive
flutter of streaming marble draperies. Now do you think that the marble
clouds and the marble fluttering drapery would be conducive to the
beauty of the group, to the perfection of visible forms? Certainly not.
And, therefore, Apollo and Artemis, gods though they are and chief
actors in the story, have simply been left out in this its artistic
representation.

For beauty of form has a double origin: it is not only an intellectual
conception, but also a physical embodiment; and the intellectual
conception is altered by the nature of the material in which it is
embodied. The abstract form which will be infinitely delicate and
life-like in the brown clay, which receives every minute dimple and
crease from the finger of the artist, which presents a soft, uniform
tint to the spectator; this same abstract form will be coarse and
lifeless in the purple speckled porphyry, against whose hard grain the
chisel is blunted, and the mottled colour and salt-like sparkle of which
hide from the eye the real relations of line and curve, of concave and
projection. The Mercury who, in the green bronze, floats upwards like a
bubble, would jump like a clodhopper in the dingy white plaster. And
these, remark, are differences only in one category of material and
handling; change the sort of material and manner of handling and the
differences become still greater. Statues, whether in clay, bronze,
porphyry, or plaster, a