have been scooped out
not merely by age, but by low mind, fretting and triumphant animalism.
Now, by what means did the sculptor--the sculptor, too unacquainted with
sculptural beauty (witness his ugly ideal statues), to be able, like the
man who turned the successors of Alexander into a race of leonine though
crazy demi-gods--to insidiously idealize these ugly and insignificant
features; by what means did he turn these dead men into things beautiful
to see? I have said that he took up art where Graeco-Roman Antiquity had
left it. Remark that I say Graeco-Roman, and I ought to add much more
Roman than Greek. For Greek sculpture, nurtured in the habit of perfect
form, art to whom beauty was a cheap necessity, invariably idealized
portrait, idealized it into beauty or inanity. But when Greek art had
run its course; when beauty of form had well-nigh been exhausted or
begun to pall; certain artists, presumably Greeks, but working for
Romans, began to produce portrait work of quite a new and wonderful
sort: the beautiful portraits of ugly old men, of snub little boys, work
which was clearly before its right time, and was swamped by idealized
portraits, insipid, nay, inane, from the elegant revivalist busts of
Hadrian and Marcus Aurelius down to the bonnet blocks of the lower
empire. Of this Roman portrait art, of certain heads of half-idiotic
little Caesar brats, of sly and wrinkled old men, things which ought to
be so ugly and yet are so beautiful, we say, at least, perhaps
unformulated, we think, "How Renaissance!" And the secret of the beauty
of these few Graeco-Roman busts, which is also that of Renaissance
portrait sculpture, is that the beauty is quite different in kind from
the beauty of Greek ideal sculpture, and obtained by quite different
means.

It is, essentially, that kind of beauty which I began by saying
belonged to realistic art, to the art which is not squeamish about the
object which it represents, but is squeamish about the manner and medium
in which that indifferent object is represented; it is a kind of beauty,
therefore, more akin to that of Rembrandt and Velasquez than to that of
Michael Angelo or Raphael. It is the beauty, not of large lines and
harmonies, beauty residing in the real model's forms, beauty real,
wholesale, which would be the same if the man were not marble but flesh,
not in a given position but moving; but it is a beauty of combinations
of light and surface, a beauty of texture oppose