as by so many masks; its religious art has familiarised us with
faces fixed immovably into blank types of placid reverie; and men and
women, in the hurry of life, often wear the sharp impress of one
absorbing motive, from which it is said death sets their features free.
All such instances may be ranged under the grotesque; and the Hellenic
ideal has nothing in common with the grotesque. It allows passion to play
lightly over the surface of the individual form, losing thereby nothing
of its central impassivity, its depth and repose. To all but the highest
culture, the reserved faces of the gods will ever have something of
insipidity. Again, in the best Greek sculpture, the archaic immobility
has been thawed, its forms are in motion; but it is a motion ever kept in
reserve, which is very seldom committed to any definite action. Endless
as are the attitudes of Greek sculpture, exquisite as is the invention of
the Greeks in this direction, the actions or situations it permits are
simple and few. There is no Greek Madonna; the goddesses are always
childless. The actions selected are those which would be without
significance, except in a divine person--binding on a sandal or preparing
for the bath. When a more complex and significant action is permitted, it
is most often represented as just finished, so that eager expectancy is
excluded, as in the image of Apollo just after the slaughter of the
Python, or of Venus with the apple of Paris already in her hand. The
Laocoon, with all that patient science through which it has triumphed
over an almost unmanageable subject, marks a period in which sculpture
has begun to aim at effects legitimate, because delightful, only in
painting. The hair, so rich a source of expression in painting, because,
relatively to the eye or to the lip, it is mere drapery, is withdrawn
from attention; its texture, as well as the colour, is lost, its
arrangement faintly and severely indicated, with no enmeshed or broken
light. The eyes are wide and directionless, not fixing anything with
their gaze, or riveting the brain to any special external object; the
brows without hair. It deals almost exclusively with youth, where the
moulding of the bodily organs is still as if suspended between growth and
completion, indicated but not emphasised; where the transition from curve
to curve is so delicate and elusive, that Winckelmann compares it to a
quiet sea, which, although we understand it to be in motion, we
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