the composure
of M. Delaplanche. The _baroque_ is only violent instead of placid
commonplace, and is as conventional as any professor of sculpture could
desire. Expression means individual character completely exhibited
rather than conventionally suggested. It is certainly not too much to
say that in the sculpture of the present day the sense of individual
character is conveyed mainly by convention. The physiognomy has usurped
the place of the physique, the gesture of the form, the pose of the
substance. And face, gesture, form are, when they are not brutally
naturalistic and so not art at all, not individual and native, but
typical and classic. Very much of the best modern sculpture might really
have been treated like those antique figurines of which the bodies were
made by wholesale, being supplied with individual heads when the time
came for using them.

This has been measurably true since the disappearance of the classic
dress and the concealment of the body by modern costume. The nudes of
the early Renaissance, in painting still more than in sculpture, are
differentiated by the faces. The rest of the figure is generally
conventionalized as thoroughly as the face itself is in Byzantine and
the hands in Giottesque painting. Giotto could draw admirably, it need
not be said. He did draw as well as the contemporary feeling for the
human figure demanded. When the Renaissance reached its climax and the
study of the antique led artists to look beneath drapery and interest
themselves in the form, expression made an immense step forward. Color
was indeed almost lost sight of in the new interest, not to reappear
till the Venetians. But owing to the lack of visible nudity, to the lack
of the classic gymnasia, to the concealments of modern attire, the
knowledge of and interest in the form remained, within certain limits,
an esoteric affair. The general feeling, even where, as in the Italy of
the _quattro_ and _cinque centi_, everyone was a connoisseur, did not
hold the artist to expression in his anatomy as the general Greek
feeling did. Everyone was a connoisseur of art alone, not of nature as
well. Consequently, in spite of such an enthusiastic genius as
Donatello, who probably more than any other modern has most nearly
approached the Greeks--not in spiritual attitude, for he was eminently
of his time, but in his attitude toward nature--the human form in art
has for the most part remained, not conventionalized as in the Byza