f the Academy in Florence.
At the end of the corridor towers a superb form. I see that it is the
figure of a youth. His left hand holds a sling drawn across his
shoulder; his right arm hangs by his side, his hand grasping a pebble
close to his thigh; calm and confident, his head erect, his strength
held in leash waiting to be loosed, he fronts the oncoming of the foe.
The statue is the presentation of noble form, and it wakens in me an
accordant rhythm; I feel in myself something of what youthful
courage, life, and conscious power mean. But my experience does
not stop there. The statue is not only presentation but representation.
It figures forth a youth, David, the Hebrew shepherd-boy, and he
stands awaiting the Philistine. I have read his story, I have my own
mental image of him, and about his personality cluster many
thoughts. To what Michelangelo shows me I add what I already
know. Recognition, memory, knowledge, facts and ideas, a whole
store of associations allied with my previous experience, mingle
with my instant emotion in its presence. The sculptor, unlike the
potter, has not created his own form; the subject of his work exists
outside of him in nature. He uses the subject for his own ends, but in
his treatment of it he is bound by certain responsibilities to external
truth. His work as it stands is not completely self-contained, but is
linked with the outer world; and my appreciation of it is affected by
this reference to extrinsic fact.

An artist is interested in some scene in nature or a personality or
situation in human life; it moves him. As the object external to him
is the stimulus of his emotion and is associated with it, so he uses
the object as the symbol of his experience and means of expression
of his emotion. Here, then, the feeling, to express which the work is
created, gathers about a subject, which can be recognized
intellectually, and the fact of the subject is received as in a measure
separate from the feeling which flows from it. In a painting of a
landscape, we recognize as the basis of the total experience the fact
that it is a landscape, so much water and field and sky; and then we
yield ourselves to the _beauty_ of the landscape, the emotion with
which the artist suffuses the material objects and so transfigures
them. Into representative art, therefore, there enters an element not
shared by the arts of pure form, the element of _the subject,_
carrying with it considerations of objectiv