Sculpture of Greece is the voice of Intellect and Thought, communing
with itself in solitude, feeding on beauty and yearning after
truth:--While the Painting of Christendom--(and we must remember that
the glories of Christianity, in the full extent of the term, are yet to
come)--is that of an immortal Spirit, conversing with its God. And as if
to mark more forcibly the fact of continuous progress towards
perfection, it is observable that although each of the three arts
peculiarly reflects and characterizes one of the three epochs, each art
of later growth has been preceded in its rise, progress, and decline, by
an antecedent correspondent development of its elder sister or
sisters--Sculpture, in Greece, by that of Architecture--Painting, in
Europe, by that of Architecture and Sculpture. If Sculpture and Painting
stand by the side of Architecture in Egypt, if Painting by that of
Architecture and Sculpture in Greece, it is as younger sisters, girlish
and unformed. In Europe alone are the three found linked together, in
equal stature and perfection."--Vol. i, pp. xii.--xiv.

* * *

28. The reader must, we think, at once perceive the bold fallacy of this
forced analogy--the comparison of the architecture of one nation with
the sculpture of another, and the painting of a third, and the
assumption as a proof of difference in moral character, of changes
necessarily wrought, always in the same order, by the advance of mere
mechanical experience. Architecture must precede sculpture, not because
sense precedes intellect, but because men must build houses before they
adorn chambers, and raise shrines before they inaugurate idols; and
sculpture must precede painting, because men must learn forms in the
solid before they can project them on a flat surface, and must learn to
conceive designs in light and shade before they can conceive them in
color, and must learn to treat subjects under positive color and in
narrow groups, before they can treat them under atmospheric effect and
in receding masses, and all these are mere necessities of practice, and
have no more connection with any divisions of the human mind than the
equally paramount necessities that men must gather stones before they
build walls, or grind corn before they bake bread. And that each
following nation should take up either the same art at an advanced
stage, or an art altogether more difficult, is nothing but the necessary
consequence of its subsequ