File:Appreciation of sculpture; a handbook by Russell Sturgis (1904) (14801569213).jpg

Identifier: appreciationofsc00stur (find matches)
Title: Appreciation of sculpture; a handbook by Russell Sturgis ...
Year: 1904 (1900s)
Authors: Sturgis, Russell
Subjects: Sculpture
Publisher: The Baker
Contributing Library: Whitney Museum of American Art, Frances Mulhall Achilles Library
Digitizing Sponsor: Metropolitan New York Library Council - METRO

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n said above there isno attempt to assert any superiority of firstcentury Roman art over the splendid art ofthe Greeks: we are comparing the laterwith the earlier work as we compare thework of the pupil with that of the master :but it is open to any one to find a charmin the work of the younger men differentto that which he found in the work of thePericlean day. Or, to take the very im-portant matter of decorative sculpturewhich is not of human subject; considerthe reliefs of the time of Augustus, thestudy of the leaf forms, and indeed of plantform in general, and note that nothingdone by the Greeks in their day of greatestartistic achievement could be comparedwith this for a moment for variety, forrealistic sense of what natural objects havesignified to the artist for the purposes ofornamentation. This newly gained senseof architectural purpose in the sculpture ofplant form, animal form and even human-ity would naturally tell upon that sculp-ture which has no immediate decorative(62)
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-1 PVL^^MBBga^H The Roman Empire and Early Egypt purpose. Or again, consider the humanand the partly human figures, gardenstatues if you choose to call them so,terms and the like. The figure of unques-tionably Roman epoch (Plate XV B) whichwe compare with one as certainly Greek inorigin (Plate XV A) and Greek of a goodtime, is not necessarily inferior to it. Wemust give up the child on the fauns shoul-der—he looks like a restoration ; it wouldsurprise no one to learn that that wretchedlittle figure was put there in the time ofConstantine—but apart from this the ter-minal figure is fine and well conceived.The truth seems to be that the whole Med-iterranean world was filled with the artis-tical sense w^hich had manifested itself moststrongly in Egypt four thousand years be-fore ; in Assyria, for a moment, at a muchlater period ; probably in Babylonia andother parts of western Asia, at different andnot easily fixed periods; and at last, in itshighest development known to us, in Attic

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