Schwanthaler, the son of a statuary of Munich, is still a young man; his works first began to create a sensation in Germany in the year 1823. In spirit and fire, and creative talent, in a fine classic feeling for his art, he appeared to me to be treading in the steps of Flaxman, and like him, he is a profound and accomplished scholar, who has sought inspiration at the very fountain of Greek poetry. His basso-relievo of the battle of the ships in the Iliad, his games of Greece, his designs from the Theogony of Hesiod, and a variety of other works which I have seen, appeared to me full of imagination, and in a pure and vigorous style of art. Of him, and some other sculptors, you will find more particulars in the note-book I kept at Munich; we will look over it together one of these days.
MEDON.
Thank you; but I must needs ask you a question. In the works you have enumerated, nothing has struck me as new, or in a new spirit, except perhaps the Christ of Dannecker, and the statue of the queen of Prussia. Now, why should not sculpture have its Gothic (or romantic) school, as well as its antique, or classical school?
ALDA.
And has it not?
MEDON.
If you allude to the sculpture of the middle ages, that has not become a school of art, like their architecture and their painting: yet can it be true that there is something in our modern institutions, our northern descent, our christian faith, inimical to the spirit of sculpture?—and, while poetry in every other form is regenerate around us, that in sculpture alone we are doomed to imitate, never to create?—doomed to the servile reproduction of the same ideas? that this alone, of all the fine arts, is to belong to some peculiar mode of existence, some peculiar mode of thinking, feeling, and believing? "Qui me delivrera des Grecs et des Remains?"—who will deliver me from gods and goddesses, and from all these
"Repetitions, wearisome of sense,
Where soul is dead, and feeling hath no place?"
ALDA.