Not only the form of it is perfect, but again, which is unique, it suffices for the thought of the artist. The Greeks, having assigned to the body a dignity of its own, were not tempted, like the moderns, to subordinate it to the head. A chest breathing healthily, a trunk solidly resting on the thighs, a nervous supple leg impelling the body forward with ease; they did not occupy themselves solely with the breadth of a thoughtful forehead, with the frown of an irritated brow, or the turn of a sarcastic lip. They could limit themselves to the conditions of perfect statuary, which leaves the eye without an iris, and the head without expression; which prefers quiet personages, or those occupied by insignificant action; which commonly employs only a uniform tint, either of marble or cf bronze; which leaves the picturesque to painting, and abandons dramatic interest to literature; which, confined to, but ennobled by, the nature of its materials and its limited domain, avoids the representation of details, of physiognomy, of the casualties of human agitation, in order to detach the pure and abstract form, and thus illuminate the sanctuaries with motionless, peaceful, august effigies in which human nature recognized its heroes and its gods.
Statuary, accordingly, is the central art of Greece; other arts are related to it, accompany it, or imitate it. No other art has so well expressed the national life; no other was so cultivated or so popular. In the hundred small temples around Delphi, in which the treasures of the cities were kept, "a whole world of marble, gold, silver, brass, and bronze, twenty different bronzes, and of all tints, thousands of glorified dead in irregular groups, seated and standing, radiated the veritable subjects of the god of light."[9] When Rome, at a later day, despoiled the Greek world of its treasures, this vast city possessed a population of statues almost equal to that of its living inhabitants. At the present time, after so many centuries and such devastation, it is estimated that more than sixty thousand statues have been discovered at Rome and in its surrounding Campagna. A like harvest of sculpture has never been seen, such a prodigious abundance of flowers,—a display of flowers so perfect, a growth so natural, so continuous and varied. You have just seen the cause of it, in digging up the earth layer by layer, and in observing that all the foundations of the human soil, institutions, manners, ideas, have contributed to sustain it.
[1] Grote, History of Greece—Boeckh, Political Economy of the Athenians—Wullon, Slavery in Antiquity.
[2] The Frogs of Aristophanes; the Cock of Lucian.
[3] Their proper name was wall-piercers.
[4] Thucydides, Book I. See the divers expeditions of the Athenians between the peace of Cimon and the Peloponnesian war.
[5] Xenophon. The Lacedemonian Republic, passim.
[6] The Dialogues of Plato. The Clouds of Aristophanes.
[7] The Lacedemonians adopted this custom about the 14th Olympiad.—Plato.
[8] Herodotus.