the Renaissance, and bade the wafer-like simulacrum
fill up, expand, raise itself, lift itself on its elbow, arise and take
possession of the bed of state, the catafalque raised high above the
crowd, draped with brocade, carved with rich devices of leaves and
beasts of heraldry, roofed over with a dais, which is almost a triumphal
arch, garlanded with fruits and flowers, upon which the illustrious dead
were shown to the people; but made eternal, and of eternal magnificence,
by the stone-cutter, and guarded, not for an hour by the liveried pages
or chaunting monks, but by winged genii for all eternity. Some people, I
know, call this a degradation, and say that it was the result of corrupt
pride, this refusal to have the dear or illustrious dead scraped out any
longer by the shoe-nails of every ruffian, rubbed out by the knees of
every kitchen wench; but to me it seems that it was due merely to the
fact that sculpture had lost its former employment, and that a great art
cannot (thank Heaven!) be pietistically self-humiliating. Be this as it
may, the sculpture of the Renaissance had found a new and singularly
noble line of work, the one in which it was great, unique, unsurpassed,
because untutored. It worked here without models, to suit modern
requirements, with modern spirit; it was emphatically-modern sculpture;
the only modern sculpture which can be talked of as something original,
genuine, valuable, by the side of antique sculpture. Greek Antiquity had
evaded death, and neglected the dead; a garland of maenads and fauns
among ivy leaves, a battle of amazons or centaurs; in the late
semi-Christian, platonic days, some Orphic emblem, or genius; at most,
as in the exquisite tombs of the Keramikos of Athens, a figure, a youth
on a prancing steed, like the Phidian monument of Dexileus; a maiden,
draped and bearing an urn; but neither the youth nor the maiden is the
inmate of the tomb: they are types, living types, no portraits. Nay,
even where Antiquity shows us Death or Hermes, gently leading away the
beloved; the spirit, the ghost, the dead one, is unindividual.
"Sarkophagen und Urnen bekraenzte der Heide mit Leben," said Goethe; but
it was the life which was everlasting because it was typical: the life
not which had been relinquished by the one buried there, but the life
which the world danced on, forgetful, round his ashes. The Romans, on
the contrary, graver and more retentive folk than the Greeks, as well as
more domes