singness he became more and more careless, until he who at twenty
had carved the lovely angel of S. Domenico, came at last to make all his
men prize-fighters and his women viragos. It is clear that we nowhere
get his final meaning,--that he does not fairly get to his theme at all,
but is stopped at the outset, and loses himself in the search for a
mode of expression more adequate to that "immense beauty" ever present
to his mind,--so that the matter in hand occupies him only in its
superficial aspects. What he sought on all hands, in his endless
questioning of the human frame, his impatience of drapery, the furious
haste to reach the live surface, and the tender modulation of it when it
is reached, was to make the flesh itself speak and reveal the soul
present at all points alike and at once. Nothing could have satisfied
him but to impart to the marble itself that omnipresence of spirit of
which animal life furnishes the hint. In this Titanic attempt the means
were in open and direct contradiction to the end. It was a violation of
the wise moderation of Sculpture, whose rigid and colorless material
pointedly declines a rivalry it could not sustain. Else why not color
the stone? The hue of flesh is the most direct assertion of life, but at
the same time a direct negative to that totality and emphasis of the
particular shape on which Sculpture relies. The color of the flesh comes
from its transparency to the circulation,--the eternal flux of matter
coming to the surface in this its highest form. It is the display in
matter itself of what its true nature is,--not to resist, but to embody
change,--to reduce itself to mere appearance, and be taken up without
residuum in the momentary manifestation, and then at once give place to
fresh manifestations.

That the earlier practice of coloring statues was given up just when the
need would seem to be the greatest shows its incompatibility with the
fundamental conditions of the art. In the twelfth and thirteenth
centuries statues were still painted and gilded. Afterwards, color is
restricted to parts not directly affected by the circulation, the hair
and the eyes; and at last, when Sculpture is given over to pictorial
effect and is about to yield entirely to Painting, it is wholly
relinquished. Evidently it was felt that to color a statue in imitation
of flesh would only enforce the fact that it is stone.

What Art was now aiming at was not the mere appearance of life, but a
unity