Greek sculpture has come to be regarded
as the product of a peculiarly limited art, dealing with a specially
abstracted range of subjects; and the Greek sculptor as a workman
almost exclusively intellectual, having only a sort of accidental
connexion with the material in which his thought was expressed. He
is fancied to have been disdainful of such matters as the mere tone,
the fibre or texture, of his marble or cedar-wood, of that just
perceptible yellowness, for instance, in the ivory-like surface of
the Venus of Melos; as being occupied only with forms as abstract
almost as the conceptions of philosophy, and translateable it might
be supposed into any material--a habit of regarding him still further
encouraged by the modern [190] sculptor's usage of employing merely
mechanical labour in the actual working of the stone.
The works of the highest Greek sculpture are indeed intellectualised,
if we may say so, to the utmost degree; the human figures which they
present to us seem actually to conceive thoughts; in them, that
profoundly reasonable spirit of design which is traceable in Greek
art, continuously and increasingly, upwards from its simplest
products, the oil-vessel or the urn, reaches its perfection.
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