the Florentine Renaissance, the means of escape from the matter of fact.  The concrete art of sculpture becomes an art of mystery and of suggestion—­an art having affinities with that of painting.  Hollows are filled up, shadows are obliterated, lines are softened or accentuated, as the effect may require, details are eliminated or made prominent as they are less or more essential and significant, as they hinder or aid the expressiveness of the whole.  It is by such methods that beauty is achieved, that the most unpromising material is subdued to the purposes of art, that even our hideous modern costume may be made to yield a decorative effect.  Pure sculpture, as the ancients understood it, the art of form per se, demands the nude figure, or a costume which reveals it rather than hides it.  The costume of to-day reveals as little of the figure as possible, and, unlike mediaeval armor, it has no beauty of its own.  A painter may make it interesting by dwelling on color or tone or texture, or may so lose it in shadow that it ceases to count at all except as a space of darkness.  A sculptor can do none of these things, and if he is to make it serve the ends of beauty he has need of all the resourcefulness and all the skill of the master of low relief.  It was fortunate that the artist whose greatest task was to commemorate the heroes of the Civil War should have had the temperament and the training of such a master, and I know of no other sculptor than Saint-Gaudens who has so magnificently succeeded in the rendering of modern clothing—­no other who could have made the uniform of Farragut or the frock coat of Lincoln as interesting as the armor of Colleone or the toga of Augustus.

[Illustration:  Copyright, De W.C.  Ward.  Plate 26.—­Saint-Gaudens.  “Sarah Redwood Lee.”]

But if the genius of Saint-Gaudens was primarily a decorative genius—­if it was, even, in his earlier work, a trifle picturesque, so that, as he said himself, he had “to fight against picturesqueness,” his work was never pictorial.  He never indulged in perspective or composed his reliefs on more than one plane; never took such liberties with the traditions of sculpture as did Ghiberti, or painted pictures in bronze or marble as more than one modern has done.  His very feeling for decoration kept him from pictorial realism, and his fight against picturesqueness was nobly won.  His design becomes ever cleaner and more classic; by years of work and of experience he becomes stronger and stronger in the more purely sculptural qualities—­attains a grasp of form and structure only second to his mastery of composition.  He is always a consummate artist—­in his finest works he is a great sculptor in the strictest sense of the word.