a small one.
Hence I think that all statues above the Elgin standard, or that of
Michael Angelo's Night and Morning, are, in a measure, taken by the eye
for representations of giants, and I think them always disagreeable. The
amount of exaggeration admitted by Michael Angelo is valuable because it
separates the emblematic from the human form, and gives greater freedom
to the grand lines of the frame; for notice of his scientific system of
increase of size I may refer the reader to Sir Charles Bell's remarks on
the statues of the Medici chapel; but there is one circumstance which
Sir Charles has not noticed, and in the interpretation of which,
therefore, it is likely I may be myself wrong; that the extremities are
singularly small in proportion to the limbs, by which means there is an
expression given of strength and activity greater than in the ordinary
human type, which appears to me to be an allowance for that alteration
in proportion necessitated by increase of size, of which we took note in
Chap. VI. of the first section, Sec. 10, note; not but that Michael Angelo
always makes the extremities comparatively small, but smallest,
comparatively, in his largest works; so I think, from the size of the
head, it may be conjectured respecting the Theseus of the Elgins. Such
adaptations are not necessary when the exaggerated image is spectral;
for as the laws of matter in that case can have no operation, we may
expand the form as far as we choose, only let careful distinction be
made between the size of the thing represented, and the scale of the
representation. The canvas on which Fuseli has stretched his Satan in
the schools of the Royal Academy is a mere concession to inability. He
might have made him look more gigantic in one of a foot square.

Sec. 20. Secondly. Of things capable of variety of scale.

Another kind of exaggeration is of things whose size is variable to a
size or degree greater than that usual with them, as in waves and
mountains; and there are hardly any limits to this exaggeration so long
as the laws which nature observes in her increase be observed. Thus, for
instance: the form and polished surface of a breaking ripple three
inches high, are not representation of either the form or the surface of
the surf of a storm, nodding ten feet above the beach; neither would the
cutting ripple of a breeze upon a lake if simply exaggerated, represent
the forms of Atlantic surges; but as nature increases her bulk,