hless and inimitable as these statues are in grace
and beauty. The Laocooen and the Dying Gladiator are indeed exceptions,
for it is character which constitutes their chief merit,--the expression
of pain, despair, and agony. But there is almost no intellectual or
moral expression in the faces of other famous and remarkable antique
statues, only beauty and variety of form, such as Powers exhibited in
his Greek Slave,--an inferior excellence, since it is much easier to
copy the beautiful in the nude statues which people Italy, than to
express such intellectual majesty as Michael Angelo conceived--that
intellectual expression which Story has succeeded in giving to his
African Sibyl. Thus while the great artist retained the antique, he
superadded a loftiness such as the ancients rarely produced; and
sculpture became in his hands, not demoralizing and Pagan, resplendent
in sensual charms, but instructive and exalting,--instructive for the
marvellous display of anatomical knowledge, and exalting from grand
conceptions of dignity and power. His knowledge of anatomy was so
remarkable that he could work without models. Our artists, in these
days, must always have before their eyes some nude figure to copy.

The same peculiarities which have given him fame as a sculptor he
carried out into painting, in which he is even more remarkable; for the
artists of Italy at this period often combined a skill for all the fine
arts. In sculpture they were much indebted to the ancients, but painting
seems to have been purely a development. In the Middle Ages it was
comparatively rude. No noted painter arose until Cimabue, in the middle
of the thirteenth century. Before him, painting was a lifeless imitation
of models afforded by Greek workers in mosaics; but Cimabue abandoned
this servile copying, and gave a new expression to heads, and grouped
his figures. Under Giotto, who was contemporary with Dante, drawing
became still more correct, and coloring softer. After him, painting was
rapidly advanced. Pietro della Francesca was the father of perspective;
Domenico painted in oil, discovered by Van Eyck in Flanders, in 1410;
Masaccio studied anatomy; gilding disappeared as a background around
pictures. In the fifteenth century the enthusiasm for painting became
intense; even monks became painters, and every convent and church and
palace was deemed incomplete without pictures. But ideal beauty and
harmony in coloring were still wanting, as well as f