completely exhibited rather than conventionally suggested.  It is certainly not too much to say that in the sculpture of the present day the sense of individual character is conveyed mainly by convention.  The physiognomy has usurped the place of the physique, the gesture of the form, the pose of the substance.  And face, gesture, form are, when they are not brutally naturalistic and so not art at all, not individual and native, but typical and classic.  Very much of the best modern sculpture might really have been treated like those antique figurines of which the bodies were made by wholesale, being supplied with individual heads when the time came for using them.

This has been measurably true since the disappearance of the classic dress and the concealment of the body by modern costume.  The nudes of the early Renaissance, in painting still more than in sculpture, are differentiated by the faces.  The rest of the figure is generally conventionalized as thoroughly as the face itself is in Byzantine and the hands in Giottesque painting.  Giotto could draw admirably, it need not be said.  He did draw as well as the contemporary feeling for the human figure demanded.  When the Renaissance reached its climax and the study of the antique led artists to look beneath drapery and interest themselves in the form, expression made an immense step forward.  Color was indeed almost lost sight of in the new interest, not to reappear till the Venetians.  But owing to the lack of visible nudity, to the lack of the classic gymnasia, to the concealments of modern attire, the knowledge of and interest in the form remained, within certain limits, an esoteric affair.  The general feeling, even where, as in the Italy of the quattro and cinque centi, everyone was a connoisseur, did not hold the artist to expression in his anatomy as the general Greek feeling did.  Everyone was a connoisseur of art alone, not of nature as well.  Consequently, in spite of such an enthusiastic genius as Donatello, who probably more than any other modern has most nearly approached the Greeks—­not in spiritual attitude, for he was eminently of his time, but in his attitude toward nature—­the human form in art has for the most part remained, not conventionalized as in the Byzantine and Gothic times, but thoroughly conventional.  Michael Angelo himself certainly may be charged with lending the immense weight of his majestic genius to perpetuate the conventional.  It is not his distortion of nature, as pre-Raphaelite limitedness glibly asserts, but his carelessness of her prodigious potentialities, that marks one side of his colossal accomplishment.  Just as the lover of architecture as architecture will protest that Michael Angelo’s was meretricious, however inspiring, so M. Rodin declares his sculpture unsatisfactory, however poetically impressive.  “He used to do a little anatomy evenings,” he said to me, “and used his chisel next day without a model.  He repeats endlessly his one