IV
CLASSIC SCULPTURE
I
French sculpture naturally follows very much the same course as
French painting. Its beginnings, however, are Gothic, and the
Renaissance emancipated rather than created it. Italy, over which the
Gothic wave passed with less disturbing effect than anywhere else, and
where the Pisans were doing pure sculpture when everywhere farther north
sculpture was mainly decorative and rigidly architectural, had a potent
influence. But the modern phases of French sculpture have a closer
relationship with the Chartres Cathedral than modern French painting has
with its earliest practice; and Claux Sluters, the Burgundian Fleming
who modelled the wonderful Moses Well and the tombs of Jean Sans Peur
and Phillippe le Hardi at Dijon, among his other anachronistic
masterpieces, exerted considerably greater influence upon his successors
than the Touraine school of painting and the Clouets did upon theirs.
These works are a curious compromise between the Gothic and the modern
spirits. Sluters was plainly a modern temperament working with Gothic
material and amid Gothic ideas.
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