Perry, Walter Copland: Greek and Roman sculpture: a popular introduction to the history of Greek and Roman sculpture (London, 1882)

TO

TNTR OD UCTION.

the Persians, and Apollo himself defended his temple against the
attack of the victorious Gauls. ' The universe within was divided
by no wall of adamant from the universe without, and the form of
the spirit mingled and dwelt in trustful sisterhood with the form of
the sense.'1 ' Religion,' says Ottfried Miiller, ' opens to man a
spiritual world, which, though it does not come within his experience
in the external world, requires external representation.' The whole
character of the Greek theogony is essentially anthropomorphic, and
it is to the fusion of the Divine and human in this mythology, and to the
glorious forms which the poets fashioned from the precious amalgam,
that we owe the noblest conceptions and the highest achievements
of plastic art. The purer faith which succeeded polytheism is far less
favourable to the growth of art. The one true God of the Jew,
'whose going forth is from the end of the heaven, and His circuit
unto the ends of it'—the God ' who is a spirit,' ' who dwelleth not in
temples made with hands,' cannot be, or ought not to be, the
subject of artistic representation ; and the Jews had, properly speak-
ing, no national art, and that which they borrowed from heathen
nations was entirely decorative. The pure spirituality, the ascetic
morality of the Christian Faith, whose object is infinite, immortal,
invisible—which is apt to regard the body not only as distinct from
but as the foe, the snare, and the prison of the soul—would also
seem at first sight altogether antagonistic to an art whose highest
aim is the representation of ideal beauty in human form. That
there is, notwithstanding, a Christian art of very high excellence,
especially pictorial, is again owing to the fusion of the Divine and
human nature, in the fullest and highest sense of the words, in the
person of the Saviour, and, in a different and lower degree, in that
of the Virgin Mary and the Saints. Yet even here we must confess
that the Christian artist has to do violence to his religion, and to a
certain extent to degrade and heathenisc it before he can adapt it
to artistic requirements. The ideal of the Saviour is not that of
heroic strength and beauty, but of ' the Man of Sorrows and ac-
quainted with grief,' 'bruised for our transgressions,' 'who when

1 Cariyle on Ludwig Tieck