f his devotion.

At this early period, therefore, Mr. Ruskin's strictures as to the
impossibility of distinguishing the individuality of the different gods
must be admitted, and even supplemented by an admission of the
impossibility of distinguishing gods and goddesses from human beings.
The explanation is obvious enough. During this age of early progress the
constant aim of the sculptor is to attain to complete mastery over the
material and to perfection of bodily form. In religious art, what
corresponds to this is the struggle towards anthropomorphism--first to
represent the gods in human form, and then to make that form the most
perfect that human art can devise. During this stage of artistic and
religious development the type and the ideal cannot be distinguished. It
was only when a type or a varying series of types had been brought to
perfection in the fifth century, so as to satisfy the demand for a
harmonious system of bodily proportions, for beauty of outline and
dignity of countenance, that these types could be used as a means of
expression for the religious ideals of the nation. In developing the
type the accidental has to be discarded, and with it much of the feeling
of individuality; works of early archaic art, for all their defects,
often show more sign of individual character than the more perfect works
of the earlier part of the fifth century. The attainment of the type is
followed by an infusion of character and individuality, drawn from the
artist's trained memory and observation with clear artistic intention,
not from the mere caprice of an accidental recollection or a casual
peculiarity of a model. The character and individuality thus expressed
must be considered in subsequent chapters; it is only necessary here to
distinguish it from the suggestion of an individual, almost of a
caricature, which we find sometimes in archaic art, and which is
certainly to be seen occasionally in works of Florentine sculpture.
During the period of the rise of Greek sculpture the various schools
were advancing each in its own way towards what has been called
naturalism in art, as opposed to realism on the one side and idealism on
the other. That is to say, they were striving by constant study of the
athletic form, of proportions and muscles, of drapery and hair, to
attain to a series of types both in harmony with themselves and in
accordance with nature; and they were too much absorbed in this attempt
to go far beyond t