seen as form with twisted metal wire.
It is as impossible to embody certain perceptions in some stages of
handicraft as it would be to construct a complex machine in a rudimentary
condition of mechanics. Certain modes of vision require certain methods
of painting, and these require certain kinds of surface and pigment. Until
these exist, a man may see correctly, but he cannot reproduce what he is
seeing. In short, the work of art represents the meeting of a mode of
seeing and feeling (determined partly by individual characteristics,
partly by those of the age and country) and of a mode of treating
materials, a craft which may itself be, like the mind of the artist,
in a higher or lower stage of development.

The early Greeks had little occasion to become skilful carvers of
stone. Their buildings, which reproduced a very simple wooden structure,
were ornamented with little more than the imitation of the original
carpentering; for the Ionic order, poor as it is of ornament, came only
later; and the Corinthian, which alone offered scope for variety and
skill of carving, arose only when figure sculpture was mature. But the
Greeks, being only just in the iron period (and iron, by the way, is the
tool for stone), were great moulders of clay and casters of metal. The
things which later ages made of iron, stone, or wood, they made of clay
or bronze. The thousands of exquisite utensils, weapons, and toys in our
museums make this apparent; from the bronze greaves delicately modelled
like the legs they were to cover, to the earthenware dolls, little
Venuses, exquisitely dainty, with articulated legs and go-carts.

Hence the human figure came to be imitated by a process which was not
sculpture in the literal sense of carving. It is significant that the
Latin word whence we get _effigy_ has also given us _fictile_, the making
of statues being thus connected with the making of pots; and that the
whole vocabulary of ancient authors shows that they thought of statuary
not as akin to cutting and chiselling, but to moulding ([Greek: plasso]
= _fingo_), shaping out of clay on the wheel or with the modelling
tool.[13] It seems probable that marble-work was but rarely used for
the round until the sixth century; and the treatment of the hair,
the propping of projecting limbs and drapery, makes it obvious that a
large proportion of the antiques in our possession are marble copies of
long-destroyed bronzes.[14] So that the Greek statue, even