n sculptures. They are often colored. Little by
little they become graceful and elegant. The greatest works are those
of Phidias in the fifth century and of Praxiteles in the fourth. The
statues of the following centuries are more graceful, but less noble
and less powerful.

There were thousands of statues in Greece,[92] for every city had its
own, and the sculptors produced without cessation for five centuries.
Of all this multitude there remain to us hardly fifteen complete
statues. Not a single example of the masterpieces celebrated among the
Greeks has come down to us. Our most famous Greek statues are either
copies, like the Venus of Milo, or works of the period of the
decadence, like the Apollo of the Belvidere.[93] Still there remains
enough, uniting the fragments of statues and of bas-reliefs which are
continually being discovered,[94] to give us a general conception of
Greek sculpture.

Greek sculptors sought above everything else to represent the most
beautiful bodies in a calm and noble attitude. They had a thousand
occasions for viewing beautiful bodies of men in beautiful poses, at
the gymnasium, in the army, in the sacred dances and choruses. They
studied them and learned to reproduce them; no one has ever better
executed the human body.

Usually in a Greek statue the head is small, the face without emotion
and dull. The Greeks did not seek, as we do, the expression of the
face; they strove for beauty of line and did not sacrifice the limbs
for the head. In a Greek statue it is the whole body that is
beautiful.

=Pottery.=--The Greeks came to make pottery a real art. They called it
Ceramics (the potter's art), and this name is still preserved. Pottery
had not the same esteem in Greece as the other arts, but for us it has
the great advantage of being better known than the others. While
temples and statues fell into ruin, the achievements of Greek potters
are preserved in the tombs. This is where they are found today.
Already more than 20,000 specimens have been collected in all the
museums of Europe. They are of two sorts:

1. Painted vases, with black or red figures, of all sizes and
every form;

2. Statuettes of baked earth; hardly known twenty years ago, they
have now attained almost to celebrity since the discovery of the
charming figurines of Tanagra in Boeotia. The most of them are
little idols, but some represent children or women.

=Painting.=--There were illustrious painters i