" His work precisely illustrates what I take to have been,
at the best epochs, the relations of nature to such art as is loosely
to be called imitative art--what assuredly were those relations in the
mind of the Greek artist. Nature supplies the parts and suggests their
cardinal relations. Insufficient study of her leaves these superficial
and insipid. Inartistic absorption in her leaves them lifeless. The
imagination which has itself conceived the whole, the idea, fuses them
in its own heat into a new creation which is "imitative" only in the
sense that its elements are not inventions. The art of sculpture has
retraced its steps far enough to make pure invention, as of Gothic
griffins and Romanesque symbology, unsatisfactory to everyone. But, save
in M. Rodin's sculpture, it has not fully renewed the old alliance with
nature on the old terms--Donatello's terms; the terms which exact the
most tribute from nature, which insist on her according her completest
significance, her closest secrets, her faculty of expressing character
as well as of suggesting sentiment.
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