tisfy the
requirements of the Christianized taste of modern times.

The Venus de Medici was undoubtedly the ideal type of womanly perfection
in the age which produced it, but now the sex would hardly feel
themselves flattered by so poor an interpretation. The form is all that
could be desired, but the head and features are positively insipid, and
a phrenologist would tell you by the development of the cranium that
female education was not a part of the Grecian policy. There is in this
statue a certain air of wantonness, a perceptible consciousness of being
valued and admired solely for physical beauty, which just as plainly
tells the estimate placed upon woman in those times as we can read the
fact in history.

Thus we perceive sculpture as a representative art has become a
chronicler of the world's advancement, so that those who accept the
theory of human progression would naturally look for purer and more
spiritual conceptions in the artist's soul, with a corresponding
nobility in the creations of his genius. The aesthetic principle in its
higher manifestations is not the product of pagan mind, because ideal
beauty and the rules governing its expression can only be conceived by
him to whom Faith has opened the glorious possibilities of our existence
beyond the grave. In no classic picture or statue is there anything akin
to that divine affinity that is apparent in the Madonnas of the Italian
masters of the sixteenth century, investing them with a charm that
lingers like an autumn sunset In the recollection of long-departed
years. Compare the loveliest of the Madonnas of Correggio and Raphael
with the Venus of Cos, and we perceive the inferiority of mere physical
perfection to that spiritual beauty that exalts the soul of the
beholder, and awakens the slumber of his immortal longings.

Faultless finish, harmonious outlines, and voluptuous proportions are
only the result of mechanical skill, that a good imitator or copyist can
for the most part achieve by the aid of his master's model. But the
sentiment, emotion, passion, the _character_, so to speak, of the
statue, is the creation of the artist, the offspring of his quickened
brain.

It is to express the aesthetic idea struggling in the soul of genius,
that the marble takes its form, the canvas its color, sweet sounds
combine in melody, and language weaves itself into the wreath of song.
The same divine impulse, the same grasping after a higher excellence
inspires