stand at once,--examination of the
original, at your leisure, will prevent you, I trust, from ever
forgetting--what is meant by the virtue of handling in sculpture.

[Illustration: PLATE XIII.--GREEK FLAT RELIEF AND SCULPTURE BY EDGED
INCISION.]

The projection of the heads of the four horses, one behind the other, is
certainly not more, altogether, than three-quarters of an inch from the
flat ground, and the one in front does not in reality project more than
the one behind it, yet, by mere drawing,[132] you see the sculptor has
got them to appear to recede in due order, and by the soft rounding of
the flesh surfaces, and modulation of the veins, he has taken away all
look of flatness from the necks. He has drawn the eyes and nostrils with
dark incision, careful as the finest touches of a painter's pencil: and
then, at last, when he comes to the manes, he has let fly hand and
chisel with their full force, and where a base workman, (above all, if
he had modelled the thing in clay first,) would have lost himself in
laborious imitation of hair, the Greek has struck the tresses out with
angular incisions, deep driven, every one in appointed place and
deliberate curve, yet flowing so free under his noble hand that you
cannot alter, without harm, the bending of any single ridge, nor
contract, nor extend, a point of them. And if you will look back to
Plate IX. you will see the difference between this sharp incision, used
to express horse-hair, and the soft incision with intervening rounded
ridge, used to express the hair of Apollo Chrysocomes; and, beneath, the
obliquely ridged incision used to express the plumes of his swan; in
both these cases the handling being much more slow, because the
engraving is in metal; but the structural importance of incision, as the
means of effect, never lost sight of. Finally, here are two actual
examples of the work in marble of the two great schools of the world;
one, a little Fortune, standing tiptoe on the globe of the Earth, its
surface traced with lines in hexagons; not chaotic under Fortune's feet;
Greek, this, and by a trained workman;--dug up in the temple of Neptune
at Corfu;--and here, a Florentine portrait-marble, found in the recent
alterations, face downwards, under the pavement of St'a Maria
Novella;[133] both of them first-rate of their kind; and both of them,
while exquisitely finished at the telling points, showing, on all their
unregarded surfaces, the rough furrow of the fa