for then it would follow that all parts of it were alike significant.  Haydon was delighted to find reproduced in the Elgin marbles certain obscure and seeming insignificant details of the anatomy that later schools had overlooked, such as a fold of skin under the armpit of the Neptune, etc.  But any beginner at a life-school could have pointed out in the same statue endless deficiencies in anatomical detail.  The fold was put in, not because it was there, but because to the mind of the Greek artist it meant something.  Sculptors of the present day comfort themselves with the belief that their works are more complete and more accurate in the anatomy than the antique.  Very likely, for the ancients did not dissect.  But this accuracy, if it is founded on no interest beyond accuracy, is after all an impertinence.

The Greek ideal is founded on the exclusion of accident.  It is a declaration that the casual shape is not the true form; it is only a step farther to the perception that all shape is casual,—­the reality seen, not in it, but through it.  The ideal is then no longer perfect shape, but transparency to the sentiment; the image is not sought to be placed before the beholder’s eyes, but painted as it were in his mind.  Henceforth, suggestion only is aimed at, not representation; the cooeperation of the spectator is relied upon as the indispensable complement of the design.  The Zeus of Phidias seemed to the Greeks, Plotinus says, Zeus himself, as he would be, if he chose to appear to human eyes.  But a Crucifixion is of itself not at all what the artist meant.  It is not the agony of the flesh, but the triumph of the spirit, that is intended to be portrayed.  If the end be attained, the slighter and more unpromising the means the better.  Thus a new scale of values is established; nothing is worthy or unworthy of itself; nothing is excluded, but also in nothing is the interest identified with the thing, but imparted.

Christian Art, after mere tradition had died out,—­for instance, in the Byzantine and early Italian pictures from the eighth to the middle of the thirteenth century,—­presents the strongest contrast to all that had gone before.  The morose and lifeless monotony or barbarous rudeness of these figures seems like contempt not only of beauty, but of all natural expression.  They are meaningless of themselves, and quite indifferent to the character they represent, which is appended to them by inscriptions,—­their relative importance, even, indicated only by size, more or less splendor of costume, etc., but the faces all alike, and no attempt made to adapt the action to the occasion.  It is another world they belong to; the present they pointedly renounce and disdain, condescending to communicate with it only indirectly and by signs.