Viewing page 22 of 39

This transcription has been completed. Contact us with corrections.

22

Elevation to similar association.  Still more do sculpture, necessarily so simple in its forms and uniform in color and architecture the principles of which seem so little founded on nature depend for their interest on the wonderful works that have come down to us from a yet more remote period.
     
Without these secondary attractions we fear that the fine arts would languish and die in their busy and practical days. We have lost many of those sources of excitement which produced the masterpiece we admire and imitate. Nothing but the contexts of the arena could have called out such counterparts of nature as the Fighting and Dying Gladiators or clothed in such perfect human forms the ideal beauty of the Apollo and Artimis. It was not merely the opportunity of seeing the naked figures in all its variety of action; though that enabled the ancients ignorant as they probably were of anatomy to attain in their stature a correctness which [[strikethrough]] made their sculpture [[/strikethrough]] all the science of the moderns has failed to reach; but it