Standing before the Medicean tombs the modern susceptibility
receives perhaps the most poignant, one may almost say the most
intolerable, impression to be obtained from any plastic work by the hand
of man; but it is a totally different impression from that left by the
sculptures of the Parthenon pediments, not only because the sentiment is
wholly different, but because in the great Florentine's work it is so
overwhelming as wholly to dominate purely natural expression, natural
character, natural beauty. In the Medici Chapel the soul is exalted; in
the British Museum the mind is enraptured. The object itself seems to
disappear in the one case, and to reveal itself in the other.
I do not mean to compare M. Rodin with the Greeks--from whom in
sentiment and imagination he is, of course, as totally removed as what
is intensely modern must be from the antique--any more than I mean to
contrast him with Michael Angelo, except for the purposes of clearer
understanding of his general aesthetic attitude. Association of anything
contemporary with what is classic, and especially with what is greatest
in the classic, is always a perilous proceeding.
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