Читать книгу A History of Sculpture онлайн

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In the nature of things all our correlations will not be equally exhaustive or correct. The philosophical method is more open to errors arising from individual prejudice than the more strictly scientific one, which is content to collect and group examples. In some cases, moreover, peculiarities of style and subject will depend upon circumstances extremely remote from present-day experience, and, therefore, peculiarly difficult to express adequately. Nevertheless, we hope to suggest a method, and to lay a foundation upon which our readers will be able to build. Though we shall base our generalisations upon a comparatively few examples, we shall seek to provide niches into which practically all the greater works of sculpture can be fitted.

Bearing in mind that our only concern is with what may be termed “vital sculpture”—art with a message for the twentieth century—we may ask, where should a beginning be made?

Unfortunately, the art of sculpture, unlike history, has never been blessed with an Archbishop Ussher willing to vouch for the day and hour of its birth in some year after 4004 b.c. As a craft, of course, sculpture dates from the very earliest times. While the prehistoric painter was scratching his first rude picture in the sands about his doorway, his sculptor brother was whittling a stick into the semblance of a human figure, or roughly moulding the river clay to his fancy. The results interest the archæologist, and rightly find a place in our museums rather than in our art galleries. But they are not what we have in mind when we speak of “paintings” or “sculpture.”