an modelled a female nude equal to the Aphrodite of
Melos, or a male nude equal to the Apoxyomenos of the Braccio Nuovo.
He is also right in pointing out that no Greek sculptor approached the
beauty of facial form and expression which we recognise in Raffaello's
Madonna di San Sisto, in Sodoma's S. Sebastian, in Guercino's Christ
at the Corsini Palace, in scores of early Florentine sepulchral
monuments and pictures, in Umbrian saints and sweet strange
portrait-fancies by Da Vinci.

The fact seems to be that Greek and Italian plastic art followed
different lines of development, owing to the difference of dominant
ideas in the races, and to the difference of social custom. Religion
naturally played a foremost part in the art-evolution of both epochs.
The anthropomorphic Greek mythology encouraged sculptors to
concentrate their attention upon what Hegel called "the sensuous
manifestation of the idea," while Greek habits rendered them familiar
with the body frankly exhibited. Mediaeval religion withdrew Italian
sculptors and painters from the problems of purely physical form, and
obliged them to study the expression of sentiments and aspirations
which could only be rendered by emphasising psychical qualities
revealed through physiognomy. At the same time, modern habits of life
removed the naked body from their ken.

We may go further, and observe that the conditions under which Greek
art flourished developed what the Germans call "Allgemeinheit," a
tendency to generalise, which was inimical to strongly marked facial
expression or characterisation. The conditions of Italian art, on the
other hand, favoured an opposite tendency--to particularise, to
enforce detail, to emphasise the artist's own ideal or the model's
quality. When the type of a Greek deity had been fixed, each
successive master varied this within the closest limits possible. For
centuries the type remained fundamentally unaltered, undergoing subtle
transformations, due partly to the artist's temperament, and partly to
changes in the temper of society. Consequently those aspects of the
human form which are capable of most successful generalisation, the
body and the limbs, exerted a kind of conventional tyranny over Greek
art. And Greek artists applied to the face the same rules of
generalisation which were applicable to the body.

The Greek god or goddess was a sensuous manifestation of the idea, a
particle of universal godhood incarnate in a special fleshly