APPROACH TO CHRISTIAN SCULPTURE


by Dom Hubert van Zeller


Copyright by SHEED & WARD, INC., 1959


LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOG CARD NUMBER: 59-12088


NIHIL OBSTAT: A. M. YOUNG, O.S.B.
MARCH 3, 1959


IMPRIMATUR: H. K. BYRNE, O.S.B.
AB. PRES.
MARCH 16, 1959


NIHIL OBSTAT: GALL HIGGINS, O.F.M. CAP.
CENSOR LIBRORUM

IMPRIMATUR: FRANCIS CARDINAL SPELLMAN
ARCHBISHOP OF NEW YORK
JUNE 1, 1959


TO NIALL, BY WAY OF CROSSING HIS SWORD WITH A CHISEL



Contents


PREFACE

CHAPTER 1 REMOTE

CHAPTER 2 LESS REMOTE

CHAPTER 3 PROXIMATE

CHAPTER 4 MORE PROXIMATE

CHAPTER 5 IMMEDIATE

INDEX

List of Illustrations

I. The Last Supper (DETAIL)   FRONTISPIECE 

II. Altar-Piece 

III. Deposition

IV. Saint Joseph

V. Head of Saint Martin

VI. Saint Joseph and Child (FRAGMENT)

VII. The Last Supper

VIII. Saint Thomas (DETAIL OF The Last Supper)

IX. Mary as a Child

X. Madonna and Child

XI. Blessed Oliver Plunkett

XII. Abraham and Isaac

XIII. Saint Benedict



PREFACE

MAY I, forestalling the reviewers who will not be slow to notice 
its shortcomings, myself review this book? "The author"--so I 
would write if I were employed to review--"has clearly not read 
half the works which should be read before such a study is 
attempted; he can pretend to no more than the most elementary 
knowledge of aesthetics; nor has he the excuse of being a well-
known sculptor from whom books may be expected in the way that 
paintings are expected from heads of state. What right has such 
an amateur, and in such a small volume, to discuss such a 
specialized subject?" The argument about being an amateur is 
never wholly convincing: every professional has been an amateur 
at one time. But the charges are valid. While not attempting to 
advance credentials I do advance an explanation. My job is 
religion and cutting stone. After more than a quarter of a 
century in both these activities I have come to see the 
connection between the two. Having treated elsewhere of religion, 
I treat here of cutting stone. The one, in my experience, has 
helped the other. I might add that working in company has enabled 
me to benefit by the ideas of others, working in solitude has 
enabled me to form my own. Besides, and this raises another 
point, I am not writing because I am qualified to discuss 
Christian sculpture but because I am dismayed at the present lack 
of direction in Christian sculpture.

It is not that interest in sacred art is altogether wanting, even 
in England, but that it is wanting among those who are in a 
position to steer its course. A number of reasons could be given 
for this: the clergy have already enough on their hands in the 
building of churches and schools without having to worry about 
getting the right sort of statues; the more influential laity 
have never had it put to them that there is any real principle 
involved; the artists are content to satisfy the general demand 
without seriously compromising their artistic consciences.[1] Thus 
the rest of the faithful, those who are not either ecclesiastics 
or benefactors or professionals, have to manage the best they can 
with what is given to them. So it goes on: no sure lead being 
given, no true standards of appreciation being learned, no wide 
demand for the services which an authentic artistic tradition is 
capable of rendering.

The problem is partly economical, therefore, and partly cultural. 
While there is nothing much one can do about the economical side 
of it, there should be ample scope on the cultural. Before we go 
any further, the word "culture," as meant here, must be properly 
understood. It must not be taken as implying the esoteric--indeed 
the whole burden of the argument is that art appreciation must 
not belong only to an initiated class--but the way of current 
thinking. One of the main difficulties about art appreciation is, 
as we shall see on a later page, that while half the world 
imagines it to be a faculty automatically possessed by all and 
knowing no other standard but the subjective, the other half 
imagines it to be the prerogative of an exclusive few, the 
sophisticated. This second mistaken attitude is liable to be 
strengthened by the very people who are trying to break it down. 
It is assumed, for example, that the writings of men like Jacques 
Maritain, Pie Regamey, E. I. Watkin, and the late Maurice Denis 
are beyond the ordinary person's intelligence. "It is gratifying 
to know that there are Catholics who can write at that level 
about art" is the attitude, "but of course it is above one's 
head." Culture, then, is to be understood here not as cultivated 
thought but as the cultivation of thought. And in the cultivation 
of thought it is everybody's business to take a part.[2]

This book is accordingly addressed to a variety of readers. For 
the layman and priest alike, it is meant to clarify the issues at 
stake; for the stone-carver it is meant to make more precisely 
religious the employment of his powers; for the non-Christian it 
is meant to explain what our artistic tradition and sculptural 
effort are about. A book which proposes to itself so wide a range 
both of reader and of purpose will have to keep its eye on 
several horizons at once technical, historical, aesthetic, 
religious--and so will tend to share, in its advantages as well 
as in its defects, the character of an empire exhibition: some of 
it may be of interest to many, all of it will be of interest to 
few. Much, whichever way you look at it, will be what Fleet 
Street calls "inside tack."

Also resulting from the employment of such a method must be, 
anyway to the reader who is an expert in any one of the fields 
mentioned above, the trite nature of some of its conclusions. But 
the true very often is trite, and I for one am not above the use 
of the platitude in a good cause. One man's truism is another 
man's revelation. Nor does anyone have to accept my opinion--
where it is an opinion and not a presentation of the Church's 
doctrine or even respect it. This is the advantage of so much 
connected with the subject: there are a few fundamental truths 
which we must acknowledge if we are to get anywhere at all in it, 
and the rest is anybody's guess. Just because I happen to think 
that the Romanesque represents the peak of Christian sculpture, 
and that the Gothic Revival represents the depths, I do not 
demand the agreement of my readers. The most that I would ask of 
a reader would be the patience to note the reasons which I might 
advance for my view. Every book about art, as about all subjects 
that are worth while, is a personal book.

While the principles outlined in the following pages would apply 
substantially to art as a whole, they are here narrowed to the 
sculptural frame of reference for two reasons. First, because 
sculpture is the only branch of art about which I have been able 
to learn anything worth telling to anyone else. Second, because 
it is the branch which, on the authority of the most 
knowledgeable, most truly reflects the feeling of its age. 
"Sculpture sums up the main features of an epoch," writes Sir 
Leigh Ashton, one-time Director of the Victoria and Albert 
Museum, "and if we remain blind to its appeal, we debar ourselves 
from much that is most valuable in the creative achievement of 
the past."[3] "Let us not forget," writes the Russian sculptor, 
Naum Gabo, "that all the greatest epochs at the moment of their 
apogee manifested their spiritual tension in sculpture."[4] It is 
not a question of which art-form, painting or sculpture, is more 
excellent, but which art-form is more representative. That Mardo 
Rosso thought sculpture more "expressive" than painting or that 
Leonardo da Vinci thought painting more "intellectual" than 
sculpture is not strictly to the point. More to the point would 
be to claim that Rosso as a sculptor better typified the late 
nineteenth century than Leonardo da Vinci as a painter typified 
the late fifteenth.

Further restricting the frame of reference, the subject-matter of 
this book envisages primarily carving, either in wood or stone, 
and only to a secondary extent modelling. Again it is not a 
question of which is superior, carving or modelling, but of which 
is felt to be the more representative. Certainly it is the more 
direct. Eric Gill anyway took it to be so. "I shall assume that 
the word sculpture," he writes in a short work which will be much 
drawn upon in the course of the present study, "is the name given 
to the craft by which things are cut out of solid material, 
whether in relief or in the round. I shall not use the word as 
applying to the craft of modelling in clay or wax."[5] In an 
engraving rather extravagantly called "The Appropriate Activity 
of Man," Gill shows a stone-carver at work on a statue of the 
Madonna and Child; it probably never entered his head to show a 
man painting or modelling. "The cutting of stone," says the same 
authority, "is the type of the craft of the sculptor. The 
modelling of clay is for him merely the means of making 
preliminary sketches...it is not desirable to make exact models 
in clay, because the sort of thing which can be easily and 
suitably constructed in clay may not be, and generally is not, 
suitable for carving in stone...modelling in clay is a process of 
addition; whereas carving is a process of subtraction."[6]

Though Gill champions the "taille directe," and is strict in his 
use of the word "sculpture," he is not such an oracle that he 
must be followed without qualification. Rodin's suggestion, far-
fetched perhaps but not without its force, is in this connection 
worth remembering: that when we think of God in the act of 
creating we think of him as modelling, not as carving. Be this as 
it may, and allowing a margin for allusion to the kindred craft, 
the present work has the carving of stone principally in view.

Passing from apology and explanation to acknowledgement, I must 
express my grateful indebtedness to those authors living and dead 
whose books I have found particularly helpful in the composition 
of what follows. Among recent publications the four most 
frequently consulted are: "Art Sacre au XXe Siecle" by P. R. 
Regamey (Editions du Cerf, 1952); "Sculpture: Theme and 
Variations" by E. H. Ramsden (Lund Humphries, 1953); "A Concise 
History of Art" by Germain Bazin, translated by Francis Scarfe 
(London: Thames and Hudson, 1958; Boston ["A History of Art"]: 
Houghton Mifflin, 1959); "Atlas of the Early Christian World" by 
F. van der Meer and Christine Mohrmann, translated by Mary 
Hedlund and H. H. Rowley (Nelson, 1958). Less recent, but as 
often and as gratefully turned to, are: "Style in Sculpture" by 
Sir Leigh Ashton, F.S.A. (Oxford University Press, 1947); "The 
Sculptor Speaks," Jacob Epstein to Arnold Haskell (Heinemann, 
1931); "Some Modern Sculptors" by Stanley Casson (Oxford: 
Clarendon Press, 1928); and the following works by Eric Gill: 
"Sculpture, An Essay on Stonecutting with a Preface about God" 
(St. Dominic's Press; New York, Chaucer Head, 1932), "Beauty 
Looks After Herself" (Sheed and Ward, 1933); "In a Strange Land" 
(Jonathan Cape, 1944); "Last Essays" (Jonathan Cape, 1942). To 
the above must be added the following articles printed in "Modern 
Sacred Art," edited by Joan Morris (Sands, 1938): "Reflections on 
Sacred Art" by Jacques Maritain; "Art and Society" by E. I. 
Watkin; "The Modern Artist and Sacred Art" by G. Severini; "The 
Concept of Beauty" by T. C. Terburg.

To those who have provided the photographs I am also much 
indebted: Mr. Desmond Tripp, A.I.B.P., F.R.P.S. (frontispiece and 
plates 1 to 8); Mr. John Cotton (plate 9); the Hon. Patrick 
Morris (plate 10); Messrs. R. A. Haines and B. Clarke (plate 12); 
Mr. Douglas Steuert (plate 13). The camera has shown itself to be 
kind to stone-cutting.



ENDNOTES

1. Cardinal Lercaro refers to the priests, the people, and the 
artists as "the three pillars of the Church's art." If pillars 
are to be effective in the work of support, they must agree with 
one another about what they are supporting.

2. "A book like the one Charlier has just written, "The Martyrdom 
of Art or Art Thrown to the Beasts" (1957), as well as similar 
writings by Thibon or Marcel de Corte, show with all needed 
clearness that this art does not exist against modern culture, 
i.e. in a total lack of sympathy with its ideals, realizations 
and plans, and that on the contrary it wants to develop in 
accordance with the idea of returning to Christian ways of 
working...it would without doubt be unjust to ignore this 
position, but it would be just as absurd to believe that there 
lie sufficient elements for a solution. We too want Christendom, 
but not the kind outlined or described by these writers."--Dom 
Frederic Debuyst, "Art d'Eglise," no. 105, "Expositions de 1958."

3. "Style in Sculpture," p. 7.

4. Quoted by E. H. Ramsden in "Sculpture: Theme and Variations," 
p 47.

5. "Sculpture," p. 21.

6. Ibid., pp. 26, 27.



1. REMOTE


						i

BEFORE a piece of sculpture can be called Christian we must be 
sure that it can be called sculpture. Our approach to the 
spiritual significance will be by way of the material substance: 
the sculptural principle must be got right first. Sculpture is 
that arrangement of interrelating planes, masses, surfaces and 
lines which results in a unity corresponding to a unity which 
exists in the sculptor's mind. It is a certain thickness shaped 
at the hand of man and inspired by man's creative thought. 
"Thickness" demanding more than surface, "hand" demanding more 
than machine, "thought" demanding more than visual imagination.

So if Rodin said of sculpture, as he is alleged to have said, 
that it was "the art of presenting to the eye the travelling 
outline," he cannot have meant to account for more than one 
aspect of the art--and that not the most important.[1] As they 
stand, the words suggest that all the sculptor has to do is to 
see that when you walk round his work you can trace an 
interesting edge to it. But Rodin would have stoutly denied this 
idea--with its implication of a revolving silhouette. More 
important than the perimeter is the volume which comes bulging 
out at you between the outlines. Unless this thickness curves 
away interestingly and convincingly towards the outlines, the 
piece of carving will be at best only a drawing transferred from 
one medium to another.

Even in the case of a relief, where outlines have a direct 
bearing upon the composition, the essential quality does not lie 
in the boundary but in what stands out between the boundaries. A 
relief is not a drawing conceived in depth. A relief, just as 
much as a carving in the round, is first of all a thing of depth. 
A relief is a piece of sculpture which happens to have an outline 
fixed in a certain place. Its outline does not travel all the 
way. A relief should be thought of as a statue which stops short 
at a particular stage and does not go round at the back.

Height and width can be planned beforehand; they can be measured 
out on paper; they constitute what is called (rather 
inadequately) the design. The quality of thickness, however, is 
more elusive. Its effect in the finished work cannot be so 
precisely foretold. But it is this quality, which in the craft 
they call "roundness," that makes sculpture. The sculptor who can 
foresee his planes and surfaces, who can judge beforehand the 
roundness which will come out of his composition, and who over 
and above has a thought to convey, truly has in his head a 
design. Otherwise he has only got a pattern.

So whether working in the round or in relief, the sculptor must 
think in terms of the third dimension every bit as much as he 
must think in terms of the other two. It is in the substance of 
the work that the substance of the thought is primarily conveyed. 
While Maillol's "roundness is all" may be an exaggeration, it is 
not much of an exaggeration. As an example of roundness, from a 
more recent inspiration than Maillol's but carrying the same 
doctrine along its logical course, there is the work of Mr. Henry 
Moore. For Henry Moore, as for Jean Arp, Barbara Hepworth, Guito 
Knoop, and a number of other contemporary sculptors, roundness is 
of the essence of sculptural expression.

But you do not have to go all the way to abstract or near-
abstract carving in order to see what roundness means to 
sculpture. The "Venus of Willendorf" in Vienna and the "Venus of 
Lespugue" at Saint-Germain show that roundness was the first 
consideration during the Upper Palaeolithic Period.[2] The same 
quality is evident during the best periods of Greek carving, and 
in the truest examples of sculpture that have come since. You see 
it in every work of Michelangelo, Rodin, Bernard, Gaudier-
Brzeska, Gordine; you see it in much of the work of Epstein, 
Mestrovic, and Gill.[3] The first thing to look for in sculpture is 
not skilfulness of execution, not resemblance to corresponding 
objects in nature, not usefulness. The first thing to look for 
(leaving the question of interior actuations until later) is the 
shape of the thing in bulk.

It would be a mistake to infer from this that the best sculpture 
must be the thickest sculpture, and that the sculptor's job is to 
turn out good solid stuff which could never be mistaken for 
whatever it was that served as model. There is much thick 
sculpture in London which is not at all good sculpture: the lions 
in Trafalgar Square, for instance. Just as in painting it is a 
question not of the strongest colours but of the right colours, 
so in sculpture it is a question not of weight but of balance. 
Where everything in a piece of sculpture is integrated and 
proportionate, the dimensions are of secondary consequence. Where 
the thicknesses are related to one another the effect will be one 
of lightness. In the grounds at the back of New York's Museum of 
Modern Art lies a huge recumbent figure by Maillol. Though 
enormous, it does not give the impression of being massive. You 
feel that if you pushed it in the right place you could tip it 
over with a finger into the ornamental sheet of water at its 
side. Only when you have stopped to think do you realize that to 
budge it an inch you would need a crane.

The sense of heaviness is normally a weakness rather than a 
strength. When the monumental looks monumental, there is usually 
something wrong with it. Ernst Barlach, surely one of the finest 
sculptors of our time, often lends a feeling of heaviness to his 
figures; but this is deliberate, and in order to express 
clumsiness. Carl Milles, when he wants to expose the materialism 
of the age, does the same. Heaviness is all right as a device; it 
is disastrous as a mistake.


						ii

But there are other points to be noted in the execution of the 
sculptor's idea than those of relating the masses, preserving the 
line, and suggesting depths. A cardinal requirement, and one 
which is made much of in any discussion of the subject, is truth. 
Truth is essentially the same in sculpture as it is in anything 
else, but there are in sculpture certain applications of it which 
need indicating. If truth is conformity to a standard, there will 
be in every art certain canons, conventions, principles, which 
are proper to that art and to which works of that art must be 
referred. If the works fail to conform, they are not expressions 
of that art but rebels against it. Whether carved, modelled, 
written, painted, danced, acted, or picked out on a musical 
instrument, the work must correspond both with the conception in 
the artist's mind and with the medium chosen for the job.

In sculpture the relationship between the sculptor and his 
material is as important as the relationship is in religion 
between God and man. In each case the relationship rests upon the 
fidelity of the human being to an existing law. The realization 
of truth is measured by the degree of conformity to the 
particular standard set. The inspiration which animates both the 
sculptor and the Christian has to find its appropriate expression 
through the right handling of the right medium. In the case of 
Christianity the inspiration is Christ and his Gospel, in the 
case of sculpture it is whatever the sculptor chooses to allow; 
in the case of Christianity the medium is life, in the case of 
sculpture it is whatever his hands are fashioning.

So the actual execution of the work can be seen as the 
development both of the sculptor's inspiration and the material's 
possibility. It is therefore up to the sculptor to choose those 
materials which, first as vehicles of his inspiration and second 
as subjects to his ability, he can best develop. "It is obvious 
that if you do not care in what material your idea takes shape," 
says Gill, "you might as well be a modeller as anything else. But 
if you are that kind of workman who finds in his material a 
complement to himself, and that material is stone, modelling in 
clay must be kept in a wholly subordinate position."[4] If you opt 
for clay you must keep the rules of clay, if you opt for stone 
you obey the principles of stone.

"The proper modelling of clay," says Gill earlier in the same 
essay, "results, and should so result, in a certain spareness and 
tenseness of form and any desired amount of freedom or detachment 
of parts. The proper carving of stone upon the other hand 
results, and should so result, in a certain roundness and 
solidity of form with no detachment of parts."[5] If Rodin's work 
in bronze shows the tenseness, spareness, and freedom of parts 
required of modelling, Gill's own achievements in stone bear out 
the other list's demand. As good a test as any of carved 
sculpture is that it should remain substantially the same after 
being kicked down a hill as before. The test is reputed to have 
come from Michelangelo, and is cited here to illustrate the 
closeness, the self-contained character, of good carving. A 
modelled work of sculpture, under no such obligation to be 
compact, would never reach the bottom of the hill: the knees and 
elbows would stick in the ground.

So the manner of carving is to a certain extent governed by the 
matter: the chisel carves stone in one way and wood in another. 
Even the design is to a certain extent governed by the material 
used. An ivory figure is conceived in one way, a granite figure 
in another. The same is true of modelling: ceramics, for example, 
impose a whole category of precautions which can be ignored by 
the man who works in unglazed clay. Thus it should be possible to 
tell from the drawing of a statue not only whether it has been 
carved or modelled, but what was the substance cut or modelled. 
On this showing it will be noticed that my stone relief "Blessed 
Oliver Plunkett" (plate XI) is bad sculpture; it might equally 
well have been carved in wood. When a commercial firm offers to 
turn out a model in any one of a variety of different materials, 
two things can be assumed without doubt: first that the 
commercial firm has no sense of craft, and second that the 
original model is untrue to the medium of its composition.

There are, it is true, master sculptors who can rise above the 
laws of their medium, but to do this is the privilege of the 
elect. A Belloc or a Winston Churchill can take liberties with 
the rules laid down in Fowler: Fowler is for the ordinary man, 
for the careful man, for the perfectionist. A Michelangelo or a 
Mestrovic can override the strictest art-school rules--witness 
Michelangelo's "Slave" and Mestrovic's "Moses", where in each 
case the marble has been forced to produce a member which 
stretches out into space. Certainly the Greeks did not scruple as 
the "Winged Victory" of Samothrace and the "Dying Warrior" from 
the Temple of Aphaia show--to waive the accepted canons when it 
suited them.[6]

More important than fidelity to one's material is fidelity to 
oneself. While Michelangelo may do things with marble which 
marble might have every right to resent, he would never do with 
"Michelangelo" what his own proper genius would resent. While 
Mestrovic conjures out of the material new possibilities, he 
never strains his own possibility to a performance which is not 
his own. For Mestrovic to express himself in the manner of Moore 
would not be to express himself: it would be to do violence to 
himself and to truth.[7] The sculptor who produces works which do 
not express himself but someone else is making use not of a 
creative but of an imitative gift.

For sculpture to be alive it must emerge out of the living 
thought; it is dead if it follows a formula. One man may 
legitimately shape his thought according to the thought of 
another. This is what we all do when we try to follow Christ--or 
when we try to follow anyone who can show us the mind of Christ--
but it is a mistake for a man to shape his work according to the 
work of another. Such a work, which is meant to be judged as a 
sculptural creation, can never come to life. It can survive as an 
example of a particular school but it cannot survive as an entity 
of its own.

For a style of carving to be copied, its inspiration has to be 
experienced. For a particular work to be copied, its original 
impulse must be shared; the reproduction is then not so much a 
copy as the expression of a similar impulse. But this is no 
excuse for working to another man's pattern. In my own case I 
learned much from my failure to model myself, in design and 
technique, upon the carving of Ivan Mestrovic. The purpose seemed 
to me logical enough: Mestrovic appeared to me to be the finest 
religious sculptor of the century, perhaps of any century, so I 
could not go wrong in slavishly following him.[8] Analysing the 
results of this experiment, I found that they were stone dead.

So it is no good trying to work out one's own problem according 
to another man's solution. Truth appears to us in its way, and we 
respond to it in ours. Truth remains absolute, showing itself in 
different degrees of clarity to different people; the response is 
various, showing itself variously according to individual 
natures. While there is no harm in following one school of 
sculpture rather than another, there is harm in following one 
school so closely that the individual creative spark is 
smothered. More will be said about the sculptor's personal 
responsibility when we come to examine his conscience towards the 
end of the book. What we are considering here is not so much the 
sculptor as the works which he produces.

So far, then, the conclusion amounts to this: carvings which are 
either not of the material's nature or not of the carver's 
nature, but are of some nature extrinsic to the relationship 
between material and carver, stand self-condemned.


							iii

If each material has its own proper nature, so also has each art-
form its own proper nature. If there are reasons why works of 
stone may not be expressed in a way which belongs to bronze, 
there are much stronger reasons why sculpture may not be 
expressed in ways which belong to literature, drama, music and 
the rest. Sculpture may illustrate literature, but not do the 
work of literature. Sculpture may allow a certain dramatic 
appeal, but it may not try to do what the drama does. Sculpture 
must stand on its own feet and be judged in its own terms.

This means that before sculpture can serve a cause it must be 
justified on merits irrespective of the cause. Before it can 
preach a sermon or tell a story, it must prove that it has a 
sculptural right to raise its voice. Only when its sculptural 
credentials have been verified can a carving begin to think about 
edifying, instructing, appealing, amusing, surprising, or 
whatever it is that calls. A judge may make entertaining comments 
in court, and increase his reputation for wisdom thereby, but his 
value to the law will depend on his justice, not on his jokes.

Failure to grasp this essential principle about sculpture, namely 
that it is to be true sculpture if it is to launch out into being 
religious sculpture, can set off a whole train of misconceptions. 
Almost all the fallacies about religious art arise out of the 
initial fallacy which makes "what people want" the primary, and 
often the sole, criterion. If what people want of religion itself 
can be one or other of religion's secondary expressions for 
example, pleasant music, intelligent sermons, spectacular 
ceremonies--it is not surprising that the demands which they make 
of religious art are also misplaced. It is the same law which 
holds good in either case: religion is looked to primarily for 
its intrinsic truth; so also is art. What is wanted as well as 
intrinsic truth is another matter.

Thus (before we get on to religious art proper) it would be 
extrinsic to the nature of sculpture that it should be made to 
jump about or recite poetry. Art-forms may be related but they do 
not easily mix. The only art-forms which seem able to get on with 
one another in each other's world are music and drama and dance. 
Certainly when music is introduced to sculpture--as when the 
statue of Amenophis at Thebes was so constructed that it gave out 
a scale of notes on being struck by the rays of the rising sun, 
or when the figure of our Lady of Lourdes plays the Lourdes hymn 
when lifted into the air--the result is faintly ridiculous. 
Ingenuity, no less than incongruity, can be one of art's worst 
enemies.

Sculpture, perhaps more than any other art-form, relies on unity. 
For sculptural coherence there must be completeness of matter as 
well as of thought. Extraneous material can be as disturbing to 
the essential entity as extraneous ideas and mannerisms. One 
reason why much of our modern abstract sculpture is felt to be 
ambiguous is surely because elements are introduced which have 
the effect of dividing the essential interest. While the use of 
string and wire in compositions which have stone or wood as their 
medium may well serve secondary purposes, they tend to distract 
from the wholeness of the work.

If contemporary sculpture has to meet the charge of mixing its 
materials, so also has the sculpture of other ages. The inlaying 
of various metals has been known to stone since at least the 
ninth century B.C. Egypt, Assyria, Chaldea, Persia and Crete 
passed on the tradition to the Greeks and Romans, who used the 
technique more sparingly. Byzantium went in for plastering its 
icons with precious stones, and encasing its figures in gold. But 
where this can be justified on the grounds that hard substances 
were being mixed with hard substances there is less excuse for 
later developments which saw the mixture of hard with soft. How 
are we to judge the dressed-up statues of Spain, Portugal, Latin 
America--and later of Italy and France? How are we to judge 
Degas' exquisite bronze dancers with their ballet skirts of 
calico?

Then there is the question of paint. For four thousand years 
sculptors have been painting their statues,[9] and they are not 
likely to stop because of anything that is said here. The 
"Virgins of the Acropolis," the first of which was carved in 
about 550 B.C.,[10] were painted, and Plato in his "Republic" tells 
how the practice of painting statues was current in his time. The 
"Head of a Persian" from the Alexander Sarcophagus shows that 
however perfect the carving, and this is the best that the school 
of Lysippos can produce, colour was accepted as part of the 
composition.[11] And it is the same story all down the line: 
Byzantine, Romanesque, Gothic, Renaissance, Baroque, Neo-
Classical (though not so much), Realist, Romantic, Neo-Primitive, 
and much of the carving of the present day. Abstract sculpture, 
though partial to other finishes and accessories, does not 
greatly favour paint.

So those would be counted strict who denied absolutely the right 
of stone to paint. But since it is after all only a form of make-
up, the use of paint should allow itself to be governed by a 
principle. The principle submitted here, for what it is worth, is 
a simple one: so long as paint brings out the quality of the 
carving it may be used; if it makes you forget the carving it may 
not. Sculpture is something more than a pleasing arrangement of 
colours produced in depths. Michelangelo's famous axiom is here 
most apt: "Painting is excellent in proportion as it approaches 
relief, and relief is bad in proportion as it partakes of the 
character of a picture."

The accretions mentioned up till now have all been more or less 
in keeping with the static character of sculpture. A problem 
arises in the case of modern abstract sculpture: how do the 
suspended, flexible, transparent, and mobile elements in free 
sculpture accord with the idea that sculpture is something still, 
fixed, solid, set? Admittedly the works of such moderns as Lynn 
Chadwick (using wood and stretched rayon), Alexander Calder (wire 
and metal), Naum Gabo (plastic and crystalline), Anton Pevsner 
(oxidized brass and plastic) have loosened up the older-
tradition. But the question turns on what may legitimately be 
sacrificed to the good of loosening up.

These free and mobile compositions challenge conventions which 
have been sacred to sculpture since before the Sphinx was planted 
in the desert. Indeed it might be said that the Sphinx represents 
a tradition of "tight" carving in which the Assyrian winged bull 
(no daylight showing there in the gaps), the Egyptian athlete 
(arms rigid against his sides), the Parthian noble (trousers as 
ample as our modern waders), the Buddha of the fourth and fifth 
centuries (virtually immovable) find kinship. In the same family 
are Barlach, Milles, Epstein today. To abandon the solid for the 
transparent, the rooted for what can be stirred by blowing at it, 
would seem to deny the nature of sculpture. Sculpture is not 
meant to float in the air any more than it is meant to float on 
the sea. What may be true decoration or true entertainment is not 
necessarily true sculpture. Sculpture is formidable or it is 
nothing.

It is difficult to see where the abstract sculptors would draw 
the line. If they allow as sculpture linear constructions which 
wave about, they should allow as sculpture the plastic model of 
the Holy Father which, on the release of a lever, raises the 
right hand and gives a triple blessing. If we, the old-fashioned 
traditionalists, make no claim for the clockwork Holy Father and 
the musical-box Lourdes figure beyond that of devotion--make no 
claim for the scale-playing statue of Amenophis beyond that of 
expertise and symbolism[12]--then why should not votaries of the 
abstract, disclaiming sculptural pretensions, be ready to accept 
the label of decoration?


						iv

If it is to qualify as sculpture, religious or monumental, or 
simply as fine art which serves no purpose beyond that of being 
beautiful, a work must satisfy two further conditions. But since 
both these arise out of the conditions which we have been 
considering, and are in any case obvious, they can be treated 
briefly. Other and more specific requirements will be considered 
when sculpture is surveyed in its religious context.

A carving, to be a work of true sculpture, must be proportioned. 
Proportioned, that is, within its borders. (What the carving must 
be proportioned to will be dealt with under the heading of 
"congruity.") Granted that in every work of sculpture there will 
be some features which have to be emphasized more than others, 
the need for order remains fundamental. Neither beauty nor truth 
can exist where there is no order. Where the parts are 
disordered, are out of proportion, the whole can be neither 
beautiful nor true.

Nothing shows up the false in sculpture so readily as unwarranted 
distortion. If the balance both of parts and of truth is to be 
maintained in a carving, there must be no distortion for 
distortion's sake. Distortion is meant to serve a purpose; it is 
not meant to become itself a purpose. Where the principle of 
distortion is misunderstood, or deliberately violated, the result 
is deformity. It is easy to detect in a man's work (though not so 
easy to detect in one's own) the straining after effect which 
disqualifies the carving as true sculpture. Somewhere the 
proportions have been neglected, the balance has been thrown out.

"A man is an artist," says Epstein, "because he has the necessary 
judgment and skill to know what accentuation is necessary."[13] 
This observation exactly states the case for legitimate 
distortion. The true artist measures the margin of distortion and 
does not step outside it. This is because he has truth as his 
standard. The false artist, who has not got truth as his 
standard, sees distortion as an excuse for affectation; for him 
the margin widens indefinitely.

A carving in which there is no distortion at all would be dead. 
It would be a mathematical rendering, an exact replica; it would 
have no character whatever. A certain element of inexactitude is 
necessary to the work of translation, or the thing is not a 
translation but a facsimile. It is the inexactitude, controlled 
and according to principle, that reveals the life. The question 
is where to be exact and where to be inexact, what to select from 
the original and how to stress it in the translation.

When looking at a view a man instinctively selects and rejects. 
He does not have to be an artist to do this; his eye tells him 
what parts of the landscape are worth looking at. The sculptor, 
when looking at a human being, knows at once what needs 
emphasizing sculpturally. If he is a good sculptor he will 
emphasize, but with caution, the significant; if he is a bad 
sculptor he will emphasize, and without caution, the 
insignificant. The one develops the character of the object, the 
other produces a caricature of the object. The one is formative, 
the other deformative.

Admittedly the caricature has played its part in sculpture--
Daumier worked the theme successfully enough in bronze and even 
the grotesque has come to be canonized by the devotees of Gothic 
spout-heads, capitals, and misericords. But this sort of thing, 
to be sculpturally justified, has to be very well done indeed. It 
has to rely upon the principles of carving and not upon the 
laugh. It is as easy to get lost in the grotesque as it is to get 
lost in the sentimental, the naturalistic, the archaic. When 
carving surrenders to the grotesque there is little to keep it 
from the gross.

The sculptor who studies the created order with respect will 
think twice before he forces from it a twisted type. He will 
question beforehand the emphasis which he wants to give, 
subjecting it to the various lights of truth without which he 
must work in mental darkness. The grotesque in sculpture may be 
wrong for many reasons--it may offend against good taste, against 
charity, against religion, against the environment in which it is 
set--but the reason which most often puts it in the wrong is that 
it offends against the principle of proportion.


						v

The last of the requirements to be mentioned in this preliminary 
and very general review is that of reasonably good execution. 
While craftsmanship is a long way from being the whole story, the 
lack of craftsmanship may spoil the story. Sculpture, as Sir 
Joshua Reynolds observed with weight, is a serious business. A 
man must have before him, when he sets out on the job, a definite 
purpose; he must further display some measure of ability in 
carrying it out. Execution is the only thing which he has got to 
show for the more important thing that has been going on inside 
his head.

It is one thing to hack out a rough object which will do for a 
bird-bath in a garden; it is another to design and bring to its 
decent conclusion a sculptural composition. There are those who 
imagine that the rude, spontaneous flourish of the inexpert 
chisel can better indicate talent, and yield better results, than 
can thoughtful planning and hard work. Championship of the 
spontaneous, provided it leads the neophyte to a study of the 
craft, is to the good; the trouble is that it can lead to 
condoning the slapdash. While spontaneity may be part of the 
creative act, casualness can never be.

At the heart of all these sculptural principles lies the idea of 
creation. It is an analogy which never fails. (We shall meet it 
again when comparing the work of man's hands with the works of 
nature.) Just as God did not create in a mood of absent-
mindedness, so neither can man. If man is to produce pieces of 
true sculpture, he must have his wits about him: there must be 
finish to his work, not enthusiasm only. A good hunk of stone is 
better than a bad bird-bath. Even a bad hunk of stone is better 
than a bad Venus.

"Sculpture," said Eric Gill, "is a matter of both workmanship and 
design."[14] Taken by itself neither technical dexterity nor 
imaginative conception can get very far. It is for the 
workmanship to prove the quality of the conception. This is why, 
having considered some of the canons of workmanship, we can now 
begin to think of the conception. Where the inspiration has 
religion as its source and term, the activity which follows the 
inspiration will be a religious one. The sculptural expression 
which emerges from a mind informed by faith has now not only a 
new purpose to serve but also a deeper experience from which to 
draw. Added to the knowledge which comes by the senses there is 
the knowledge of truth and beauty which comes by faith. The 
wonder is that man can separate the ultimate mysteries of truth 
and beauty from those which are revealing themselves all round 
him, can appreciate the relative while forgetting about the 
absolute.



ENDNOTES

1. A more profound definition, and one which is certainly 
authentic, is Rodin's statement that a piece of sculpture is "a 
drawing from every angle." The two pronouncements are just enough 
alike to suggest that there was in fact only one, and that "un 
dessein de toutes les cotes" has been misquoted.

2. So not later than 5000 B.C. and possibly as early as 7000 B.C. 
For illustrations see Bazin, "A Concise History of Art," p. 14, 
and Sir Kenneth Clark's "The Nude," pp. 64, 65.

3. Nowhere in Gill's work is this quality more apparent than in 
the "Prospero and Ariel" group which stands above the entrance to 
Broadcasting House. Prospero's knee and the whole of the Ariel 
figure would satisfy Maillol at his most exacting.

4. "Sculpture," p. 32.

5 Ibid., p. 27.

6. About a third of the "Winged Victory" is extended away from 
the body, and between various parts of the "Dying Warrior's" 
body, shield, and helmet, daylight can be seen in seven places.

7. "Mestrovic is the only sculptor of modern times whose genesis 
owes little or nothing to prevailing tendencies in art or to 
other masters. He is at heart the product of a natural setting 
and its latent traditions."--Casson, "Some Modern Sculptors," p. 
62.

8. For what it is worth, it is still my opinion that Mestrovic is 
the finest religious sculptor of this, and perhaps of any, 
century.

9. The best and most accessible of carvings which go as far back 
as this, and which still show signs of paint, come from Egypt. 
"Head of a Scribe" is given the probable date of 2400 B.C. "Head 
of a Queen" is placed at 1360 B.C. Both are in Paris.

10. "This statue, which is a little less than life-size, is in 
many ways the most beautiful of all the series of lovely maidens 
of the Acropolis...the hair, eyes, and lips are lightly painted, 
the hair reddish-brown, the iris of the eye and the lips in dull 
red. The embroidery of the garment is picked out in blue-green. 
Ear-rings, probably in gold, were in the ears."--Casson, op. 
cit., p. 26.

11. "The eyes are brown and the oriental head-dress purple. Other 
figures on the relief have garments on which bright blue, yellow, 
and crimson are used."--Ibid., p. 26.

12. The subject symbolized is the greeting between mother and son 
at break of day. Amenophis (or Memnon, from the Egyptian "mei-
amun," beloved of Ammon) was the Ethiopian prince who fought for 
his uncle Priam, and was killed by Achilles. His mother Eos used 
to weep for him before the dawn, and as the sun rose each morning 
the dead hero would acknowledge with the sound of gently plucked 
chords the tribute to his memory. Hence, though obliquely, 
Darwin's line: "Memnon bending o'er his broken lyre."

13. "The Sculptor Speaks," p. 67.

14. Op. Cit., p. 41.



2. LESS REMOTE


						i

ALTHOUGH the approach to explicitly religious sculpture is by way 
of sculpture generally, the understanding of all true sculpture 
comes by way of the religious approach. That this is not just a 
partisan view, a propaganda actuation in the cause of religion, 
it will be the job of the present chapter to show. So far we have 
been judging sculpture in terms of the physical convex object 
which weighs this and measures that, which is made of a certain 
material and carved with certain tools. But this is only the 
patina of the subject, the surface texture. From now onwards we 
consider sculpture in terms of its spiritual content. Not yet as 
denominationally Christian and Catholic, but first as generically 
religious.

Strictly speaking, all true sculpture, and only true sculpture, 
is religious sculpture. Whatever there is that is good about a 
good piece of carving is good precisely because it reflects the 
truth and beauty of God. In the measure that it succeeds in this 
act of reflection it is a true and beautiful object; in the 
measure that it fails it is bad carving, false and ugly. Bad 
works of sculpture, however religious the subjects represented, 
are irreligious: they do not bear witness to the pattern of truth 
and beauty which is God himself. The degrees of goodness and 
badness in sculpture depend upon the approximation of the work to 
the absolute standard held out by the truth and beauty of God.

Where this doctrine is accepted and acted upon there follows a 
consistent, religious, integrated, and strictly sculptural 
tradition. Where it is neglected there is no tradition but only a 
series of reactions. The amorphous developments in our own age, 
for instance, are evidence of mental and spiritual confusion. 
Lacking primary values, sculptors cannot but apply secondary 
valuations. Where an activity which has for its realization a 
primary object is judged according to secondary standards there 
is bound to be confusion. The less interested you are in ultimate 
realities the more you fall back upon the interest provided by 
your own experience and your own desires. So of course your 
sculpture becomes egocentric, impulsive, esoteric.

In those ages of history when men recognize the same absolute 
standards there is not the same struggle in sculpture as can be 
seen today. In every age there will always be a straining towards 
the expression of an ideal, but when the ideal is agreed upon the 
tension lies within a certain defined relationship. Where there 
is no clear relationship, where a new ideal is guessed at every 
year, where the standards applied give no absolute assurance, 
there cannot but be a sense of nervousness, conflict, arrogant 
empiricism in the expression. Man cannot help looking for truth 
and beauty, as he cannot help looking for happiness, but if he 
does not look in the right direction he will fling out right and 
left. The tension will become more marked as he goes on, and the 
execution will become more extravagant.

Originally the religious approach to sculpture was taken for 
granted. It was not as a specialized branch of aesthetics that 
the facts about God's absolute beauty were taught to the carvers 
of the Palaeolithic Age. The connection between the religious and 
the sculptural was assumed. This is not to claim that the first 
images fashioned by the hand of man were designed to depict God 
or to inspire reverence; it is to claim that the works of man's 
hands were seen as essentially related to a type which lay beyond 
both the material and the man carving it. Even if the earliest 
images are concerned more with magic than with worship--
"[Primitive] man's entire activity," says Dr. Germain Bazin, "was 
aimed at skilfully intervening in the play of natural forces, in 
the hope of preserving a balance, attracting good and repelling 
evil powers"[1]--at least they show a common and innate 
subordination of the physical to the spiritual.

As the prehistorical stage in man's development gave place to the 
protohistorical, the development of sculpture was given new 
impetus by the discovery of new metals. The use of bronze, which 
was hammered and not cast, came in about 3500 B.C. It was in this 
era that the Elamite, Sumerian, and Aegean civilizations were 
flourishing. Since bronze could be had in greater quantity than 
the gold, silver, and copper which had been discovered centuries 
before, the advance which it occasioned was considerable. The 
tools used for carving bronze were still of polished stone, and 
so remained until iron-working techniques were evolved about 1400 
B.C. in Asia Minor. Iron, still a rare metal in the Near East in 
the first half of the second millennium, reached the West much 
later. What we call the Iron Age lasted for two thousand years, 
reaching to the Christian era.

During all this time the theme of sculpture fluctuated a good 
deal, and it would be absurd to pretend that religion was always 
the predominant impulse. But this much can be said in 
confirmation of our thesis: first that the highest level of 
creative expression coincides with the primitive phase of the 
Stone Age, when man had little opportunity of cultivating 
materialistic ideas; and second that during the several thousands 
of years between the Magdalenian era and the rise of the 
Egyptian, Assyrian, Persian, Chaldean, and Syrian civilizations--
a gap which showed a steady artistic decline the outlook of 
mankind turned increasingly towards materialism. Only with the 
emergence of new ideas among the peoples of south-west Asia and 
the Nile did the old supernatural values reassert themselves.

Our contention can be further supported by the fact that most of 
the traditions of sculpture existing before the Christian era 
which went in for representational treatment ended up finally in 
adopting the symbolic and even the directly religious. Scenes of 
hunting, fishing, waging war, tended to bring in gods of hunting, 
fishing, war. The illustration of a hero's exploits, the desire 
to immortalize in stone or metal the memory of a king, the 
graphic decoration of a tomb: these things are forms of chief-
worship, and for even the most elementary chief-worship there 
must be a certain deistic standard to which the chief is supposed 
to conform.

Nowhere was the apotheosis idea more developed, with its 
consequent effect upon sculpture, than among the Greeks and 
Romans. In the earlier stages of both civilizations the 
supernatural was the accepted background of life, and if the 
religious element is more evident where Greek than where Roman 
sculpture is concerned, it is because the attitude of Greece 
towards the supernatural was the more sincere.

Not so long ago it was thought necessary, if one hoped to get on 
in the world of sculpture, to carve in the manner of the Greeks. 
The "Laocoon" and the "Venus of Milo" were standard. The worst 
periods of the Greek tradition were held up for admiration for no 
other reason than that they were Greek. "We cannot," says 
Epstein, "go on eternally working like the Greeks; in order to do 
that it is necessary to think like the Greeks. We can learn what 
the Greeks had to teach, and adapt it to our own times."[2] If we 
think as the Greeks thought, philosophically and socially and 
religiously, then by all means let us carve as the Greeks carved; 
if we think as Christians, we must carve as Christians. It is 
because nineteenth-twentieth century thought has been neither 
Greek nor Christian that the returns to earlier styles have been 
so miscast. If there is one revival more inappropriate than the 
Classical Revival it is the Gothic.

The Romans had a particular gift for portraiture, and this, 
together with their feeling for civic grandeur, tended to overlay 
the religious quality of their inheritance. The link between the 
Roman and Greek traditions was Etruscan art,[3] which flourished 
between the seventh and fifth centuries B.C. If Rome had stuck to 
the Etruscan model, the Italian contribution to sculpture would 
probably have been greater than it was. The Etruscans went behind 
the Greek tradition, geographically as well as historically, 
reflecting much of Assyrian and Babylonian perception. Roman 
sculpture of the Republican period, leaving the Etruscan for the 
Greek, became increasingly naturalistic and impressive but also 
increasingly dull. On monuments and coins, in theatres and baths 
and arenas, the Greek sensibility was enviously aspired to by the 
newer race.[4] But what these prosperous Romans did not realize was 
that the Greek, for all its affinities to other styles, does not 
mix.

Another thing which these prosperous Romans did not realize was 
that a weakening of religious faith spells a weakening of 
religious art. Whatever the faith to be affected by humanism, 
humanistic carving comes out of it as a consequence. Debase the 
idea of absolute perfection and you debase the means of 
reflecting it. Styles and traditions of sculpture depend more 
upon the orientation of prevailing thought than upon any number 
of prevailing masters. The reason why this is not immediately 
evident is that the masters are almost always the products of 
their society. The society which worships God produces men who 
worship God in their work. A civilization usually gets the 
artists it deserves.

Allowing for differences of race and technical opportunity, it 
would be true to say that there is something in their sculptural 
expression which all religions hold in common. By the same token 
a common quality, or a common absence of quality, can be traced 
in the work of those who profess no religion. The carving of the 
South Sea islander may bear little resemblance to that of the 
sophisticated Greek, but if the gods are the same in each case 
there is bound to be an affinity somewhere. Peoples whose gods 
are money or luxury or war will resemble one another in their 
carving. Their images will vastly differ from those of a people 
who worship God.

By placing empire before worship, the greatest potential 
influence in the world lost its chance. In forfeiting its soul, 
Rome forfeited also its claim to true sculpture. We have now come 
up to the Christian era and to a quite new inspiration.


							ii

While the approach as here planned is not the historical so much 
as the psychological, spiritual, aesthetic and practical, a rough 
outline of the periods will be a help to the understanding of 
Christian sculpture. It is not the chronology that matters, but 
the sequence in the evolution of ideas. Without some grasp of the 
continuity, with its swing of action and reaction, the different 
schools of Christian carving are liable to be seen in isolation. 
The interesting thing about Christian carving is not the 
independence of the various traditions as they appear but their 
relationship.

It is always a matter of disappointment to reflect that the first 
wave of Christian enthusiasm was practically barren of sculptural 
expression. Reasons can be given for this. "Art does not 
flourish," writes Sir Leigh Ashton, "where its productions are 
likely to be destroyed. In Europe, through the chaotic centuries 
which followed the disintegration of the Western Roman Empire, 
material conditions were unfavourable to progress in the fine 
arts. In Europe the limited culture of the barbarian invaders was 
concerned mainly with decorative objects of personal adornment, 
jewellery and weapons. Elsewhere the Eastern Byzantine Empire 
evolved an independent style, while certain outposts, such as 
Alexandria, Ireland, and North Britain, established local schools 
which exercised a varying degree of general influence.[5]

But it was not solely because Christianity had to go underground 
during its infancy that there was little sculptural manifestation 
of the Church's spiritual vitality. Another, and perhaps more 
cogent, reason was that Christians had inherited from their 
Hebrew ancestors a certain suspicion of carved objects. If graven 
images had been a stumbling-block before, might they not be the 
same again? There seemed to be all the more danger now--now that 
God had revealed himself in a human body, and when Christ's 
mother and the saints were familiar to them as people, and when 
the martyrs' deaths were calling for a perpetuation of their 
memory--that the carving of statues would lead the newly 
converted back to the old temptations of false worship.

It must be remembered, moreover, that the world-civilization in 
which primitive Christianity found itself provided nothing in the 
way of a spiritual tradition in sculpture to which Christian 
carving could attach itself. If it was no good looking to Rome, 
it was no good looking to Athens either. Technically there was 
much to be learned, but religiously there was nothing to be 
developed. The Greeks, like the Romans after them, had too early 
turned away from their gods. There was nothing left of religion 
but metaphysics.

Lacking an existing line of spirituality which could be 
Christianized, the carvers of the first Christian centuries 
either borrowed from the classical tradition or else sharpened 
their chisels and waited.[6] As Merovingian influences began to 
make themselves felt in Europe, awakening in the minds of men the 
desire to replace the lost culture with something new, an 
artistic expression came into being which was spiritual, 
Christian, untainted by the humanism of the classical decline. 
This was the art of Byzantium.

Byzantine art had a clear field and made the most of it. Since 
order had returned to Europe there was now no need to confine 
one's expression to the walls of tombs and secret meeting-places. 
There was a general demand for the decoration and furnishing of 
newly built, or newly adapted, Christian churches; there was 
material to be had; there was freedom of transport such as had 
not been known before; above all there was the need to direct the 
minds of the faithful, in an age when visual instruction was 
second only to oral, towards the eternal truths of Christianity.

After the voice of art had spoken in whispers for nearly five 
centuries, you would expect it to utter its message aloud in a 
strange accent. But though stiff and stilted in articulation, its 
speech was far from hesitant. As regards actual statuary, the 
Byzantine expression was never prolific. Perhaps there still 
lingered this inherited prejudice against the image in the round. 
Whatever they lacked in three-dimensional achievement, however, 
Byzantine artists made up for it in icons, ivory reliefs, and the 
new idiom of the mosaic.

In order to see Byzantine art in proper perspective, we must see 
it as the outcome of forces other than artistic. Its whole 
outlook was revolutionary. Once Christians had decided to make 
use of the visual at all in their system of worship and 
instruction, they decided to apply the strictest sanctions. 
Imagery was to be a means towards worship, was to take its place 
as part of the Gospel apostolate, was to represent a complete 
negation of Greek and Roman humanism. Naturalism, the stress 
which had been given to physical beauty and temporal values, was 
to be attacked in line, form, import; supernaturalism was to be 
enshrined in its place. Since the Christian ethic stood for two 
principles, the one ascetic and the other mystical, the Christian 
expression in art must deny the earthly and point unequivocally 
to the heavenly. No approach could be more direct and logical 
than the Byzantine.

Now that the figurative was taking the place of the 
representational, the symbol and not the model became the main 
thing. Art was getting back to its original idea. But where men 
before had sought by magic to bring God down from heaven into the 
works of their hands, they now sought to raise their minds in 
prayer to God through the instrumentality of their works. Art in 
the Byzantine conception became a language between the individual 
soul and God, between the layman and the theologian, between the 
Church and the rest of the world. Art was thought of as conveying 
the Word, the "logos," the word "which must not return to God 
void" and which had been made flesh for man's salvation.

All this led in practice to certain clearly defined techniques as 
regards composition and the portrayal of the human figure. Since 
the whole thing relied on the immediate understanding of the 
symbol, everything had to be discarded which might get in the way 
of the symbol's impact. Bazin (whose favourite style is not the 
Byzantine) gives the following fair account: "Some compositions 
were reduced to a few forms linked together like words in a 
statement, reminding us of hieroglyphs. Images were now unreally 
suspended as though in flight, against an abstract gold 
background; the line of the horizon disappeared, together with 
the earth itself. Events no longer took place on the earth or in 
the sky but in an ideal universe. The figures in the composition 
no longer had the relative sizes that would be theirs in concrete 
reality, but their size was now determined by the idea behind 
them: as in the early Egyptian and Mesopotamian arts, the 
principal person in the composition towered over all the rest, 
who were grouped like dwarfs at his feet. The composition of 
landscape was treated with the same severity, a mountain becoming 
a mere mound of sand, or a building no larger than a footstool. A 
purely moral hierarchy replaced the material order of things."[7]

The Byzantine formula appealed, as may be imagined, far more to 
the East than to the West. Borrowingmore from the Eastern 
tradition of a thousand years before than from classical Greece 
and Rome, the Byzantine influence spread through the countries 
which came to be identified with the Orthodox Church more 
rapidly, and as it turned out more lastingly, than it spread in 
the West.[8] It was not that Western Europeans could not understand 
symbolism when they saw it; it was simply that they were 
everywhere surrounded, as Western Asians were not surrounded, by 
relics of the classical tradition. Culture to the West European 
meant classical culture. The art which developed in Christian 
Europe had more to unlearn.

In Northern Europe the situation was different. Here there was 
nothing to unlearn. Here the symbolical and mystical had it all 
its own way. Though more ornamental than the Byzantine which was 
taking root east of Constantinople (Byzantium), Celtic and Anglo-
Saxon art resisted the elaborations which their Christian 
brethren were going in for further south. Another difference was 
this: the Northerners felt no inhibitions about carving. Thus 
while the feeling for volume was on the decline in Eastern 
Christendom--partly as a deliberate reaction against the Greeks, 
and partly on account of the preoccupation with line and the 
specialized technique of mosaic--it was by no means dead in the 
rest of the Christian world.

This brings us to the eighth and ninth centuries when, in the 
West, Byzantium's day was almost over. Like other traditions 
before and since, the Byzantine carried its theories too far. It 
made a cult of flatness; it demanded mathematical symmetry; it 
refused to suggest movement. In its revolt against naturalism it 
revolted not only against the suggestion of perspective allowing 
now only full front-face or full profile to representations of 
the head--but against any kind of sculptured rendering of the 
human form. The movement had become so spiritualized that it was 
in danger of abandoning the Incarnation. And this is where the 
Church stepped in.

Influenced by the Muslim, now entrenched in the Mediterranean 
theatre of Christendom, a Byzantine faction began preaching the 
sinfulness of statuary. The movement might have spread, and 
iconoclasm triumphed, had not the Church in both East and West 
repudiated the idea. At Byzantium itself a reaction against 
oriental aesthetics and theologies set in. So that the ninth 
century saw a Macedonian revival in eastern Europe which was 
matched during the tenth century by the Carolingian renaissance 
in the West. The compromise traditions which resulted were not of 
a quality to last, and only in the eleventh century did an art 
come into being which was to fulfil the requirements alike of 
aesthetics and theology. In the Romanesque conception, indeed, 
theology and aesthetics were one. Such a union had not been 
achieved before, and it has been achieved since only for the 
briefest periods and in particular regions.


							iii

If a good deal of space has been devoted to the Byzantine 
tradition, which in any case was not sculptural but linear, the 
reason is twofold. First, as the earliest artistic expression of 
Christianity the Byzantine style provides norms to be referred to 
in the consideration of later periods. In every movement, whether 
ideological, religious, or artistic, it is the initial 
manifestation that must be looked at: subsequent developments can 
to a large extent be judged by their approximation to the 
original idea. Though the Byzantine theory ran away with itself 
in the end, it established sound principles when it was first 
proclaimed. It is to these principles, partly artistic and partly 
religious, that we shall be returning in our review of later 
schools. The second reason for giving Byzantium so prominent a 
place is that the Romanesque, though at two removes,[9] derived 
very largely from it.

The Romanesque approach to art in general (and for our purpose 
here to sculpture) was evolved not in Italy but in France. 
Italian Romanesque dates from nearly two centuries later, roughly 
1250 A.D.[10] Eleventh century France gave more to art than any 
other country in any other period. The Italian Renaissance of the 
fifteenth century may have made a greater display, but the French 
Romanesque made a greater impression. The effect of Romanesque 
can be judged by the style which followed it: where Renaissance 
art led on to Baroque, Rococo, and Romanticism, the Romanesque 
tradition led on to Gothic at its purest.

Romanesque carving was ushered in not by painting, as in the case 
of some schools of sculpture, but by architecture. This in itself 
was a good sign: it made for discipline, balance, and three-
dimensional design. Where Byzantine churches had allowed mosaics, 
icons and mural drawings to fill spaces anywhere which were not 
filled already, the Romanesque principle of architecture demanded 
the strictest order in church decoration: everything was planned 
to lead up to various key points in the building. There was 
nothing haphazard, either in composition or in detail, about the 
Romanesque interpretation. Where the Byzantine designers had 
stressed the most significant element of their compositions by 
eliminating every detail which might distract from it, the 
designers of the new school achieved the same result by carving 
in depth and relating the detail to the central interest. 
Sculpture, at last, came into its own.

So it is that we can find in Romanesque all the best features 
both of the Byzantine which went before and the Gothic which came 
after--with none of the extravagances which spoiled either of 
them. It combined the old feeling for symbolism, harmony, 
restraint, and spirituality with a new energy and sensitivity. 
The symbolism now was as dynamic as the truths symbolized. 
Inheriting from iconography and the mosaics a sense of 
unemotional mysticism, the carvings of the Romanesque school kept 
faithfully to the original purpose, which was to teach dogma and 
raise the soul to God in worship. The ultimate mysteries are the 
stuff of Romanesque sculpture, and if we think of it only as the 
decorative use of a formula, as the stylized transcription of 
things seen quite differently in nature, as a mannered and highly 
sophisticated idiom it means that we have missed its whole 
significance.

Like every other style the Romanesque evolved its own 
conventions, which it applied with greater strictness than most, 
but it did not allow its conventions to cramp its spontaneity. 
Nothing, not even the Gothic, could have been more creative and 
dynamic. The Romanesque is the only style of which it may be said 
that it was both traditional and progressive, doctrinal as well 
as free. It exactly reflected, as it has been our argument that 
every age of sculpture must reflect, the age. The formulation of 
dogma and the development of contemplation: these characteristics 
of the early Middle Ages reveal themselves in all the most 
typical examples of Romanesque carving. Fortunately it was not 
for some five centuries to come that sentiment and virtuosity 
were to take the place of the transcendental.

The carved Christ of the eleventh and twelfth century is above 
all the King, the Crowned Saviour, the Head of the Mystical Body. 
The Mother of God is not so much the tender woman as the august 
queen. If we look here for human loveliness we are disappointed, 
but we find instead a dignity and power which are far more 
moving. There is mystery in the Romanesque Mother of God which is 
lacking in the Madonna of even the best Gothic period. It is 
significant that we refer naturally to the Gothic "Madonna," or 
the Renaissance or the Baroque "Madonna," the implication being 
that of personal relationship and intimacy: in speaking about 
Romanesque carving we are more likely to refer to the "Mother of 
God"--the "Theotokos" legacy handed down from the Byzantines.

We who belong to a quite different way of thinking, even as 
Christians, have a quite different perception. Our eternal 
values, when we sit down to think of them, may be exactly the 
same as those professed by Catholics of the twelfth century; but 
we have to sit down to think of them. To the man of the twelfth 
century the true perspectives were habitual--or he could not have 
carved as he did or else could not have understood what he 
carved. The vision which expressed itself in the carved tympanum 
over the west door at Vezelay, an apocalyptic composition which 
typifies Romanesque thought and technique, has been lost for 
good. Without the same sense of awe we of our own age see Christ, 
his Mother, the saints, the Church and the Church's doctrines in 
different perspective.

When the vision of light and truth fades, the criteria of 
artistic achievement drop to a different level. "It is a lovely 
statue of our Lady: she smiles so sweetly." "Why do you make 
Saint Joseph look so stern? I am sure he was really such a nice, 
understanding person." "These modern sculptors have forgotten 
what babies look like, and that is why they do the Infant Jesus 
all wrong." But religious carving is meant to be a plea for light 
and truth, not for charm. No period states this more clearly than 
the Romanesque. In the last analysis religious carving stands or 
falls by whether or not it is the formulated recognition of the 
primacy of God in his created world.

What all Christians learn through the senses and through grace, 
the Christian sculptor tries to express through the medium of his 
craft. The outward work is pointing to the immanence of God, to 
the one supremely important reality. Everything else relates to 
this, the presence of God on earth and in heaven. Wherever the 
theme is obscured by decoration, however sculpturally conceived 
the decoration may be, there is fault. This is not to say that 
Romanesque carving fell into the trap of confusing the subject 
with the content--the men of that period knew better than to 
claim as religious sculpture only the examples which depicted 
religious scenes--but rather to say that the value of sculptural 
decoration was judged in relation to the essential thing which it 
decorated. The essential thing was religion.

All too often, and inevitably, Romanesque art departed from the 
old Byzantine ideal of simplification. But what mattered to the 
newer school much more than abstraction was the substantial form 
which abstraction tended to neglect. Simplifying the treatment is 
no good if what is expressed by the treatment is seen as stylized 
and not as purified. Though Romanesque designs tended to become 
complicated, the essential content continued to find expression 
with extreme directness and simplicity. For all its richness, 
Romanesque carving was saved from flamboyance by the intrinsic 
purity of its inspiration. The Gothic, centuries later, was to 
degenerate into ornamentation; the Romanesque kept decoration in 
its place.[11]

To close this section on Romanesque carving a passage from M. 
Bazin may be quoted. According to him "Romanesque [art] had no 
very deep religious bearing," so he would not agree with half of 
what has been said above, but he must be heard nevertheless. "It 
is a surge of forms elbowing each other, merging one into the 
other on arch mouldings, pilasters, tympana, spandrels and 
capitals. Everything from the very beginnings of mankind came 
together to enrich this marvellous language in stone: pagan myths 
and Christian scenes, fragments of antiquity, barbarous ornament, 
Byzantine, Sassanian, Assyrian and even Sumerian forms, for the 
old animal symbolism of the cylinder-seals of Sumeria and Elam 
found its final transformation here. Western man, as he started 
creating once again after six centuries, began by remembering; 
but he used all the forms that he remembered from the depths of 
the past as though they were words, creating a new language with 
them which he spoke with a wonderful oratorical ease."[12]

If in the foregoing pages we have tried to show that the 
Romanesque style, borrowing from the Church itself, showed marks 
of unity, holiness, and apostolicity, then the above quotation 
would indicate that the note of catholicity was not wanting 
either.


							iv

It would be a mistake to think of the Gothic style as suddenly 
bursting upon Western Europe and sweeping all before it. Equally 
it would be a mistake to think of the Romanesque as petering out 
because it had stuck too closely to the text-book. Rather it was 
a case of the text-book taking on new articles, being rewritten 
in the idiom of the time, and coming out under a new title. It 
was not the Byzantine story over again. Western Byzantine art 
had, as we have seen, come to grief partly because it had worked 
its theory to death and partly because it had played with the 
errors of Islam and Greece. The Romanesque tradition never came 
to grief at all, but merely merged quite naturally into the 
Gothic. As always, the art was following the thought: with the 
thirteenth century the thought of western Christendom was 
becoming warmer.

That the transition was not as abrupt as some would like to make 
it can be seen in the carvings at Chartres and Notre Dame. Both 
are early thirteenth century, both would bear the label Gothic, 
but it would be absurd to say that the new sculpture had 
discarded the principles of the old. Architecturally the Gothic 
designers may have invented a new style, but sculpturally they 
were merely adapting and humanizing the old.

But even granted that the Gothic is only the Romanesque grown to 
maturity, that it is the same twelfth-century theological figure 
made human with devotion, there is much about the Gothic carver 
that marked the innovator. Symbols of the human race became 
representations of human beings, and the idea tended to give 
place to the person. Just as the theology of the Sacred Humanity 
was directing the contemplative life of the Church along channels 
that had been in danger of either drying up or flowing eastwards, 
so in the Church's sculptural expression a certain 
anthropomorphism was beginning to replace the ideo-morphism which 
still showed Eastern ancestry.

But humanizing influences are tricky things to control. The 
Gothic interpretation spread fast, and at first happily, but it 
followed the course of those other movements in art that have 
made too many concessions to popular demand. If classical 
sculpture went through its phases until it ended up in frank 
naturalism, ecclesiastical sculpture cannot be blamed for going 
the same way. The wonder is that the Gothic style lasted so long, 
spread so far, and has been so consistently revived. Certainly it 
is significant that the Eternal City would have none of it. 
Indeed Italy as a whole standing out in this against not only 
France, which was the birthplace of the Gothic, but also against 
England, Germany, Spain, and the Low Countries--remained to the 
end suspicious of what it regarded as too fancy for serious 
consideration. To Italy the Gothic continued to be, for rather 
more than two centuries, a novelty--a dangerously dominating 
novelty. Italy's turn was to come with the Renaissance.

While Gothic carving can be classified almost indefinitely, 
according to the degree of elaboration it went in for, according 
to the architectural mood which it served, according to the 
different countries where it flourished and the local schools 
which interpreted it, it answers readily enough to the simple and 
unprofessional classification which divides into liturgical 
sculpture and devotional sculpture. The liturgical tended to be 
solemn, the devotional to be light. In the end of course it was 
the devotional that won. People prefer the light.

It is a curious fact that while in England the Gothic style of 
carving was almost always solemn, in Germany it was almost always 
spirited. You would have thought it would be the other way round. 
As regards England it was an advantage because when the English 
lose their sense of solemnity in sculpture they are apt to 
produce "Peter Pan" in Kensington Gardens, or, at worst, gnomes. 
We do better to risk being pompous, and stick to gravity. In 
contrast there is the lively Gothic of Bavaria and the Rhine. The 
final phase of Germany's Gothic career (late fifteenth century) 
with its triptychs, altar-pieces, angels, crowns, broken folds 
and mannered poses is just as charming as the Baroque and 
scarcely less theatrical.

But in spite of variations in rendering, the factor which 
remained common and constant in Gothic carving was that of faith. 
The Gothic expressed the religious aspiration of the whole 
society. While it taught by allegory and scriptural illustration, 
it did not have to be as didactic as the earlier schools. The 
Byzantine and the Romanesque were determined to teach, and teach 
they did. If the Byzantine and Romanesque are imposing, it is to 
some extent because they imposed. There the Church and the artist 
were dictating; the layman was taking it in. But here, in the 
case of the Gothic, the layman was at one with the effort of the 
Church and the artist. The style came as much from below as from 
above. Gothic is generally liked because it is in the strict 
sense popular. If Gothic is also, like the Byzantine and 
Romanesque, imposing, this is because it had almost the whole 
weight of Europe behind it.

The nobility of the original conception, however, did not last. 
By the end of the fourteenth century there were all the signs of 
decadence. The humanity which had been awakened a hundred and 
fifty years before was degenerating into sentimentality, 
prettiness, refinement. Gothic was becoming "embourgeoise." 
"Wealth became more generally distributed, and, through trade, 
fortunes were rapidly made," writes Leigh Ashton, accounting for 
the Gothic decline. "By asserting their burgher-rights, the 
merchants and townsmen obtained a greater share of political 
power. These provided a new market for works of art which 
themselves reflect something of the shrewdness, vigour, and 
hardheadedness that had won this class its financial and 
political position. A taste for the practical and natural ousts 
the fourteenth-century predilection for elegance and preciosity. 
As the century moves forward, this naturalistic bias is 
increasingly pronounced, though as it closes the new style has 
been enriched by exuberant adjuncts in treatment in detail, 
particularly drapery.[13]

The same author further points out how the Guilds at this period 
exercised a stranglehold on artistic output, and how the demand 
for mass-produced carving led inevitably to aesthetic stagnation. 
Both the curve of Gothic achievement and the combination of 
forces which bore upon it can be seen as exactly reflecting the 
experience of the Greeks.

The beginning of the fifteenth century saw the stirring of a new 
mood. Already the craftsmen of the Renaissance, infiltrating 
northwards by way of Nuremburg, Augsburg, and the prosperous 
cities along the trade-route from the south, were attacking the 
strongholds of the Gothic. If carvers of the Gothic had turned 
their hands to naturalistic treatment, here were these cunning 
Italians who could do it far better.

But before considering the sculpture of the Renaissance we must 
attempt a summing up of the contribution made by the carvers of 
the Gothic. In the first place they brought back a feeling for 
the round. Where the Romanesque tradition in stone is remarkable 
chiefly for its reliefs, the Gothic is seen to be equally at home 
with the complete figure. In the second place Gothic carvers gave 
themselves greater sculptural liberty than had been known in the 
Church before their time. Where the Romanesque was more single-
minded, the Gothic was less doctrinaire. In the third place 
Gothic carvers were uninhibited in their religious expression.

This combination of roundness, sculptural liberty, and religious 
enthusiasm resulted in a clearly recognizable type. The Gothic 
figure is not easily mistaken. It is of all types the most 
generally accepted as "religious." Our argument would be that the 
carvings are religious not only because the faces mostly wear a 
pious expression but because the work was performed in a 
religious spirit. If Gothic figures suggest the idea of religion 
it is because to the people of the Gothic centuries sculpture and 
personal religion were related in a way which had never quite 
been realized before and which has certainly never been repeated 
since.

The claim is not that Gothic carvers were all men of piety; the 
claim is that the men who quarried the stone, the men who did the 
transporting and putting in position, the men who looked at the 
finished work and paid for it, the men who thought about it and 
criticized it and forgot about it were all at one with the man 
who conceived and executed the work in affirming the same 
supernatural faith. When the workmen and the people for whom they 
work are in agreement about God, who is absolute beauty, the work 
itself will reflect the direction of the thought.


							v

Renaissance carving, for all its connection with the new 
learning, did not start off on intellectual lines; it started off 
merely on independent lines. The first demand was for perfect 
execution in a particular genre; culture came later. So far as 
religion was concerned the sculptor of the Renaissance was no 
longer expected, as sculptors of an earlier tradition had been 
expected, to teach. It was now every man for himself, and if he 
carved religiously, so much the better. For Gothic, Romanesque, 
Byzantine art, the faith was the firmament; for Renaissance art 
it was only the church-space. Religion and a study of the 
classics provided subjects to be illustrated; the actual 
inspiration was supposed to come from inside the artist himself.

The result was only to be expected: eclecticism, secularization, 
the glorification of the individual. "Men can do all things if 
they will," cried Alberti, the apostle of the new art, and men 
found themselves willing to do all things at once. Where hitherto 
the craftsman had worked as an anonymous member of the community-
-whether the town, guild, province or country--he now assumed a 
name and could sign it on the works of his hands for future 
generations to read. If his religious principles were no longer 
determined by the race to which he belonged, neither were the 
principles of his carving. Renaissance sculpture was the first in 
history which did not represent a collective way of thinking, a 
collective sculptural interpretation. The idea of a social group 
producing things of a kind was lost, and instead it became a 
question of personal achievement. Ghiberti, Donatello, 
Michelangelo, Riccio, Verrocchio, Bramante: great masters with 
great followings, but each one essentially unique, single, alone.

"The Renaissance, the New Poverty, marks the turning point for 
us," says Eric Gill, "and what happened then was this: man became 
critic where formerly he had been creator. Intrinsic values gave 
place to extrinsic, absolute to relative. Art which formerly 
conformed to absolute standards of knowledge and service was 
replaced by work which was valuable primarily as interpretation. 
The artist became the interpreter and his work the mirror of the 
world. The painter no longer made things which were themselves an 
integral part of nature. He made essays in the criticism of 
nature--pro or con. The great initiators of this new adventure 
soon gave place to the host of mere purveyors of the loveable--
persons who make their livings by supplying representations of 
what they and their customers like."[14]

It is a mistake to think of Renaissance sculpture as a style: it 
is any number of individual people's styles which happen to agree 
on certain points. It is not a tradition so much as an absence of 
tradition. Tradition depends on corporate experience, but there 
was no corporate experience behind Renaissance sculpture: there 
was only contemporary experience. Even the Baroque which came 
later was, in spite of its anomalies, a style which emerged from 
a common, if superficial, experience.

If Renaissance carvings have a character of their own--the Muses 
and Virtues standing always in a high wind, athletic-looking 
angels with muscular arms and firm sturdy legs, prophets and 
bishops and politicians with the forefinger on an open book--it 
is the character of the non-essential, of the polished 
performance, of the terrestrial. The Renaissance manner of 
carving represented the experience of a few great sculptors, and 
it was the expression of their genuine feeling that was imitated 
and debased until a substitute was produced which passed for 
tradition.

Of Michelangelo's effect upon the sculpture of his age, Sir Jacob 
Epstein says that "his influence was so overpowering as to be 
fatal to his contemporaries and their followers. A genius such as 
Michelangelo is disastrous to the art of his country for many 
generations. Michelangelo expressed movement and violent action 
but with calm and serenity. His ideal was potential power and 
movement, which his followers misunderstood and translated into 
restlessness and over-muscled gesture."[15]

Nevertheless in making the statue more important than the 
painting, the sculptors of the Renaissance did a service to the 
art of carving. "No doubt sculpture owed its prominence," writes 
M. Bazin, "to the fact that it was an essentially physical art in 
a period whose main aim was to give their due to the beauty and 
strength of the human body."[16] Once realism had been made a 
primary objective, moreover, it was felt that real dimensions 
were necessary. The false perspectives which are vital to the 
picture and to the relief were passed over in favour of the real 
perspectives obtained by placing carved figures in space. But it 
did not take long for Renaissance painting to catch up on 
Renaissance sculpture: painters were soon found who could give 
satisfaction with an appearance of reality which was so lifelike 
as to be almost magical.

The change of direction in sculpture from religious to secular 
did not come about either suddenly or as part of a policy. 
Ghiberti, for example, who was one of the first great names of 
the movement, went on with much that he had learned from the 
Gothic. While he and Donatello made continued use of the 
religious theme in the South, the Northern Renaissance was 
ushered in on the strictly religious work of Adam Krafft, Adolf 
Daucher, and Tilman Riemenschneider. But the change was bound to 
come, and in proportion as the Renaissance world concentrated 
increasingly on profane studies the interest in sacred sculpture 
waned. With the advance of this sophisticated era, carving became 
more complicated and individualistic in treatment, and in content 
more intellectual and rationalistic. It was the heyday of 
humanism after all.

By the second half of the century (the fifteenth) all idea of 
symbolical representation had gone. Donatello, now the leading 
exponent, was drawing upon Imperial Rome rather than upon 
Christian inspiration. Though he was imitated all over Italy, 
there was nobody who could compete with him for the dignity, 
intensity, sensitivity of his bronzes. Working in relief as well 
as in the round, Donatello displayed a versatility which must 
have been bewildering even to the quickly changing manners of the 
time. But always it was in the direction of naturalism, and 
always his disciples and rivals went the same way. Verrocchio, 
outliving the master by twenty-two years, tried it in bronze and 
perhaps came nearest to Donatello in feeling. Rosselino tried it 
in marble, and very nearly caught the master's grace. The names 
of Donatello and Michelangelo are linked together not because the 
two men worked in the same way or because they worked within a 
half century of one another. They are linked because each in his 
own way was a creative genius, and it would have been impossible 
for such creative genius to have declared itself at any earlier 
period than the Renaissance. The Renaissance established once and 
for all, for better or for worse, the position of the artist in 
society. And Donatello and Michelangelo stood, in the minds of 
men, for the artist.

That any workman should so stand, and remain standing to this 
day, is deplored by Eric Gill. "The period of decay which the 
Renaissance ushered in began about four hundred and fifty years 
ago," booms this great man; "it is now past repair. We are in a 
sinking ship and each man must save himself. There is no question 
even of 'women and children first' for in this matter all are 
equal and no man can save another's soul."[17] But in the cycle of 
history and the order of God's grace nothing is as final as that. 
The different voices of the Renaissance are only echoes of the 
different voices raised at the building of Babel's tower. But 
other generations are born, and the art of building is learned 
anew. The different phases of Renaissance evolution are only 
duplications of what we have noted in earlier movements. It is 
possible that such a social order may arise in which the artist 
works as one of a tradition, a school, a tribe, and not simply as 
a would-be expert on his own. It is possible that a social order 
may arise which is in the full sense a community: a body of human 
beings who believe in the same things and who corporately seek to 
see them realized. It will not be Communism that will produce 
such a social order; it will, if it is given its chance, be 
Christianity.


							vi

Baroque art, particularly religious Baroque art, is often hailed 
as a reaction against the ponderous aesthetic of the Renaissance. 
It may have amounted to this in the long run, but its first 
expression was by no means a counter-revolution. Nor did it come 
suddenly--with the lightness and swiftness of flight suggested by 
its angels. Far from being a Christian crusade, it began as yet 
another manifestation of rationalism; far from being quick on the 
heels of Renaissance art, it developed out of a style called 
Mannerism which was briefly but significantly transitional.

Towards the close of the sixteenth century the spirit of 
empiricism and the tendency to question everything about 
existence, present and future, was manifested in sculpture by a 
certain cold intellectualism which was reminiscent once again of 
classical Greece. But no art can subsist indefinitely on a diet 
of philosophy and brain-searching, and the cautious sculpture 
which resulted from such a diet was due for a change.

Now that the new learning of the Renaissance was turning out to 
be only a very old learning in disguise, a division came about in 
sculpture which separated those who wanted to follow the 
classical way of formalism and those who wanted to experiment 
with something less stereotyped. So that out of the Renaissance 
creed which rested on the representation of human life as seen by 
reason came two quite different schools, Neo-Classicism[18] and 
what has been known as Mannerism. Where the two schools agreed 
was in the interpretation which they gave to man's existence on 
earth: for both it was a pageant.

The story of Neo-Classicism, since it has no bearing on Christian 
sculpture, need not detain us. It followed the usual sequences 
and continued into the present century. Classicism will probably 
be revived at intervals for as long as carving is practised. The 
story of Mannerism, however, calls for some slight attention 
here: it not only served as an overture to Baroque but was also 
the medium through which religion came back to sculpture.

Mannerism, though it numbered some big names in its following, is 
not one of the styles of which sculpture may be proud. It was a 
compromise between the legacy of Michelangelo and Hellenistic 
formalism. Coming out of an environment as disillusioned, and 
what we would now call "existentialist," as our own, it was 
sculpture's late sixteenth-century bid for attention. It was 
exhibitionist, unsure of itself, nervous. Bazin refers to "that 
exacerbation of style known as Mannerism." Italy was its home, 
and the only school to hold out against it was the Venetian. Its 
exponents in the field of sculpture were Bandini, Giovanni 
Bologna (a Frenchman, surprisingly), Vittoria, and the 
metalworker Benvenuto Cellini. In the field of painting there 
were many more, but we are not concerned with painting.

Leigh Ashton describes the movement as follows: "Technical 
virtuosity plays an ever more prominent part in the works of the 
sculptors who, in emulation of their great predecessor 
[Michelangelo], at first modified and then abandoned the canon of 
classical form. The system of anatomical distortion to which they 
had recourse, and the tendency to represent the body twisted like 
a corkscrew above the hips...are hall-marks of the movement known 
as Mannerism."[19] The movement is referred to as a crisis in the 
history of sculpture, but this is surely to take it too 
seriously. It was not so much a crisis as a neurosis. It was a 
tension working towards an eventual equilibrium.

One of the factors which kept Mannerism in being longer than it 
deserved was aristocratic patronage. Favoured first at the court 
of the Medici in Florence, the fashion spread to Fontainebleau, 
where it became the royal hobby. Another thing which prolonged 
the life of Mannerism, and one more closely connected with our 
subject, was the backing given to it by the Church. The Church, 
realizing that the effects both of the Renaissance and of 
Protestantism were likely to continue, was launching its Counter-
Reformation while at the same time trying to Christianize the 
humanism nearer home. Rome saw in Mannerism a possible vehicle 
for the combating of error and the propagation of the old faith. 
It was a return to the idea of Byzantium, which had proposed a 
visual presentation of religious truth. Mannerism might not be 
the most suitable style to choose for this, but the only 
alternative was Neo-Classicism, which was worse.

Mannerism accordingly, having no particular character of its own 
beyond the aptitude for originality, took on an explicitly 
religious turn. Nowhere was Christian Mannerism shown to better 
advantage than in Spain. Working mostly in stone, Alonso 
Berruguete popularized with his racked frames and anguished faces 
the new religious style of Latin Christendom. He was followed by 
Juan de Juni, Guido Mazzoni, Niccolo dell'Arca, and Pompeo Leoni, 
who, though not themselves Spanish, like Berruguete, carved in 
the same passionate idiom. Religious Mannerism had its adherents 
also in Germany, Protestant and Catholic alike, where the great 
names of Matthias Grunewald and Lucas Cranach are connected with 
it.

So as Mannerism gradually merged into Baroque, the Church merged 
with it. In fact the Baroque, its aesthetic more clearly defined 
and its technique more uniform than anything since the Gothic, 
proved in many ways a more promising movement for the Church to 
sponsor than Mannerism had been. There were drawbacks here too--
for the new style was worldly, was of the theatre, was a little 
too sumptuous for Christian humility and a little too ebullient 
for Christian modesty, was hardly spiritual at all and by some 
might be thought even pagan--but at least it was beginning in 
Rome itself and so presumably could be controlled. In any case 
Mannerism had served its turn, and here on the move was something 
specifically Catholic, highly cultured, and full of fun.


								vii

But though the Church was as ready to serve the cause of Baroque 
as Baroque was ready to serve the cause of the Church, the new 
style was far from being exclusively ecclesiastical. Indeed in 
its later developments it became, as we shall see, increasingly 
secular. Nor was its purpose to be full of fun. Gay as it was in 
expression, Baroque took itself very seriously. It even took its 
religion very seriously, though few outside the movement would 
have been willing to believe this.

Baroque sculpture was led and perfectly typified by Bernini, 
whose life and work extended over almost the whole of the 
seventeenth century.[20] Though the style had its origins in late 
Renaissance treatment, and particularly Michelangelesque 
treatment, it represented a complete change of feeling. The whole 
tempo was lighter and quicker. Gone were the firm thighs, strong 
wrists, brooding expressions, and in their place came rounded 
limbs and cheerful looks. The sculptors of the new Italian school 
were not out to record the deeper emotions--all that was for the 
Spanish, and later for the Romantics--so much as warmth and 
visual satisfaction. If a dramatic impression could be created, 
and if possible a religious dramatic impression, no more was 
asked.

Though the impression might be one of religion, the subject-
matter and the setting being religious, there was little enough 
of religion in its content. Baroque carving was interested in the 
religious subject but not at all in the religious psyche. The 
Baroque felt no call to give impulse to eschatology, metaphysics, 
dogma or the liturgy; Christian glow, rather than Christian 
theology, was the objective. What references there were to death 
and an after-life were more for stage effect than for 
meditation.[21]

When the Baroque--taking with it its fluted gold rays, elegant 
halos, bulging and bursting clouds--spread north to Germany, 
Austria, and Switzerland, it came into the prepared environment 
of late religious Mannerism. Here in these countries it glittered 
even more than before, radiating from every altar and shrine a 
light religious fervour all its own. In the wealth of lavish 
display, vivid representation, and energetic movement, the 
function of sculpture was reduced; carving was thought of only in 
relation to the decorative scheme. There were, it is true, in 
this early eighteenth-century period of Germanic Baroque, some 
good second- and third-rate sculptors with a nice butterfly 
touch, the best of whom were Georg Donner and Egid Quirin Asam, 
but for the most part the sculptor was not given a chance of 
appearing in his own right.

England would have none of it; to the English the Baroque smelled 
of incense and Rome and shifty-looking priests. But in Spain, 
meanwhile, the Baroque was being translated into the 
temperamental idiom of the race. The factors which kept Spanish 
Baroque under control, preventing it from going in the way of the 
French interpretation which will be examined below, were first 
the nature of Spanish architecture and second the nature of 
Spanish spirituality. The Romanesque building can defy the effect 
of an alien decoration, can even assimilate it and be enriched by 
it. Most of the churches in Spain were either Romanesque or 
strong early Gothic.[22] For such as showed Moorish influence, the 
more Baroque decoration the better.

Mention has been made of Mannerist work done in Spain by two 
well-known sculptors, Berruguete and de Juni. These were followed 
as more professedly Baroque by Hernandez and Montanez, who 
represent perhaps the finest achievement of the style in any 
country. Certainly theirs is the most deeply religious of any 
Baroque expression. No butterflies here, or playful charm; this 
is the stern stuff of a truly, even of a desperately, religious 
feeling. While the next generation of Spanish sculptors, 
represented by Pedro de Mena and Alonso Cano, somewhat toned down 
the expressionism of their forerunners, the adamantly religious 
character of Spanish carving was continued. And as such it has 
continued to this day. The Rococo never touched the tradition, 
and if in our own time Spaniards want to experiment in the 
Abstract manner, they come away to other countries.

But now we turn to France, the country whose claim to the 
development of Baroque must be equal to that of Italy. With an 
eye for the histrionic, Louis XIV, living symbol of man's 
aristocratic superiority over lesser creatures, saw in the 
Baroque much what the Church had seen in Mannerism. It was a 
medium, and with its help the monarch turned the spotlight upon 
himself and upon his elegant, mundane, polite and dilettante 
court. The light was left on and the charade never stopped, and 
with each new season the masks grew more extravagant and there 
was ever more need for grease-paint. If elsewhere the Baroque was 
still the avowed religious style, in France it was frankly 
profane. The virtuosity remained but the spirit had changed. By 
the eighteenth century, Versailles, so far as sculpture and 
sculptural decoration went, had ousted Rome, and the Baroque had 
become Rococo.

Rococo, flourishing in the reigns of Louis XV and Louis XVI, was 
confined almost exclusively to France, where it was in the lead 
until the Revolution. Rivalry from Neo-Classicism, again Italian 
in origin, produced in Rococo a certain sobering effect but did 
not alter its purpose, which was to entertain. Suited to its 
pagan environment on the French Olympus, the new and now entirely 
secular Baroque lacked just that quality of astringency without 
which no style can expect to last. Sculpture, certainly, is not 
meant for spectacular fantasy; sculpture needs discipline as well 
as depths. So wanting was it at the end, even in the dramatic 
character which had impelled the style from which it derived, 
that the next artistic movement to declare itself in Europe, 
namely Romanticism, looked more to Neo-Classicism than to Rococo. 
The glow that had animated Italian, German, Austrian, Swiss, and 
Spanish Baroque was gone, and only the glitter was left.


							viii

Apart from the Gothic Revival, the various schools that have come 
into being during the past hundred and fifty years bear only an 
accidental relation to Christian sculpture. It would be 
impossible within the scope of this book to go into the spiritual 
implications of the interest that has been shown in Mexican, 
African, Indian, and Chinese carving. Such interest is not on 
quite the same level as interests expressing themselves in Neo-
Classicism and the Gothic Revival. Interest both in primitive 
tribes and in developed oriental civilizations is never likely to 
be very general, whereas interest in the Greek and the Gothic 
will always be with us: in the Greek partly for literary reasons, 
in the Gothic partly for sentimental reasons.

While taking no part, either way, in the nineteenth-century 
classical revivals, the Church took an eager part in the Gothic 
Revival. For the Church the last official style had been the 
Baroque, and having played horse to Baroque's Lady Godiva with 
increasing uneasiness for the best part of two hundred years, it 
was with some relief that the authorities could look this new 
movement squarely in the eye. It was respectable, it was 
something that the Church had known before and did not have to 
learn up afresh, it had endless material to refer to and endless 
possibilities to develop. The only thing against it was that it 
made for dullness when one had to do everything all over again, 
and especially when the spirit that had produced the original 
Gothic was only too signally lacking.

For this very reason--namely that it was not of the people but 
for the people the sculpture of the Gothic Revival is without 
fire, sunlight, poetry, music, or anything much else. The figures 
look as though they had been carved from photographs late at 
night by sick men. Carvings of the Gothic Revival are not, like 
those of the Baroque, full of fun. But at least they can be good 
of their kind and are unfailingly safe. One supposes that the 
style is still surviving, and that, subject to modifications of 
fashion, it always will.



ENDNOTES

1. "Concise History of Art," p. 11.

2. "The Sculptor Speaks," p. 77.

3. Chiefly remarkable for works of clay and bronze, and for 
designs made on imported earthenware. Belonging to central Italy, 
the Etruscans were too far away to be controlled by Greek 
conventions. Etruscan art has been called a "provincial 
extension" of Greek art.

4. "This [the Greek aesthetic] carried all before it in the last 
years of the Republic, when the Roman aristocracy were fired with 
enthusiasm for conquered Greece and vied with one another for 
originals or copies of the masterpieces of Greek art. Caesar 
began the great transformation of Rome into the Imperial capital 
by enriching it with great monuments: a forum, a theatre, the 
Basilica Aemilia, the Basilica Julia, the Curia Julia. What is 
called 'Augustan' art emerged from a great Greco-Roman synthesis 
of political theory; for Augustus wanted to found a Roman 
classicism in both literature and art which would be worthy of 
its Hellenic model and which would become the typical culture of 
the Empire...the Antonine period was one of active building all 
over the Empire. Hadrian, thoroughly steeped in Greek culture, 
tried to perpetuate the images of the finest Hellenic works of 
architecture in his villa at Tivoli."--Bazin, op. cit., p. 102.

5. "Style in Sculpture," p. 9.

6. Historians seem to have stressed this dearth of early 
Christian carving too much. In van der Meer and Mohrmann's "Atlas 
of the Early Christian World" (Nelson, 1958) there are plates 
showing thirty-six examples of sculpture carved between the 
second and fifth centuries. Taking into consideration that such a 
catalogue is not meant to be exhaustive, and that the part of the 
world represented was just that part where every effort was made 
to stamp out every trace of Christian worship, the evidence is 
formidable. Furthermore it seems likely from the specimens which 
survive that carving went on during the early phases of the 
Byzantine movement. The reason why the specimens are so few is 
not because interest in sculpture abruptly ceased, but because 
the later exponents of the Byzantine style did their best to 
obliterate the work of their fathers.

7. Op. cit., pp. 119, 120.

8. Where Byzantine art is called "Greek," the connection is with 
the Greek Church, and not with the Greek culture, to which it was 
on all counts opposed.

9. Namely the Macedonian Revival and the Carolingian school.

10. The name Romanesque has nothing to do with Rome; it was 
applied centuries later on account of the romance language which 
was the dialect in the part of France where "Romanesque" 
architecture was first tried.

11. In illustration of twelfth-century carving where ornament 
plays the supporting role there are the elaborate tympana at 
Charlieu and at Neuilly-en-Donjon. The capitals at Issoire, 
belonging to the same century, are instances of the same thing.

12. Op, cit., p. 154.

13. Op. Cit., p. 27.

14. "Sculpture," pp. 14, 15.

15. Op. cit., pp. 123, 124.

16. Op. cit., p. 232.

17. Op. cit., p. 17.

18. The label of Neo-Classicism is usually attached to an art 
which appeared somewhat later and in reaction against the Rococo. 
But since the earlier movement was working in the same direction 
as the later, the naming can be advanced so that it covers both.

19. Op cit., p. 46.

20. Giovanni Lorenzo Bemini was born in 1598 and died in 1680.

21. Though a skeleton is introduced into two of Bernini's 
sculptural compositions, the tomb of Urban VIII and the tomb of 
Alexander VII, it is more as a stage prop than as anything else. 
Symbolism as such had no great interest for Bernini.

22. Compare the French Baroque of Rouen, for example, with the 
Spanish Baroque of Compostela. In the one the decoration kills 
the architecture, in the other the decoration is subordinated by 
the architecture.



3. Proximate


								i

WE COME now to questions connected with the Christian sculpture 
of our own time: how to judge it, how to improve it, how (if we 
are ourselves carvers) to go about it. In trying to meet such 
problems we must have at the back of our minds certain basic 
assumptions without which we shall be thrashing out in too many 
directions to allow for a conclusion. Unless we understand what 
Christian sculpture stands for, we cannot even begin either to 
judge, improve, or profitably work at it.

In order to pass judgment upon a work of Christian art, we must 
appreciate its direction. Christian art has a specific 
destination, and if we confuse this specific destination with any 
other we are in no position to pronounce upon the work. It is its 
final purpose which gives to the work its proper character as 
something religious and Christian. It is also its final purpose 
which determines the quality of its beauty. While every object of 
beauty that results from the work of man is a reflection of God's 
absolute beauty, those objects which are called religious and 
Christian must reflect God's beauty in a particular way.

If it is to qualify as a work of sacred art, then, the object 
must be directed: ultimately towards God, immediately towards the 
service of religion. If it is further to qualify as beautiful, it 
must reveal a concern more with absolute than with relative 
beauty. The first point proposes a straightforward issue: does 
the artist mean or not mean his work to follow the religious 
course? The conditions imposed upon his work by an affirmative 
answer to this question will be considered in a later chapter. 
Not so straightforward are the issues raised by the second point, 
and it is with these that we must now deal.

Since man's knowledge of absolute beauty is necessarily very 
limited, is normally less developed than his knowledge of 
relative beauty, is more interior and subtle than the knowledge 
which comes to him through the senses, the tendency will be to 
judge all beauty by relative that is by natural, emotional, 
personal, sensible--standards. What follows will be an attempt 
not to teach absolute beauty--because nobody can teach beauty--
but to indicate the approach to it. If even relative beauty 
cannot be strictly taught, at least some of the errors regarding 
it can be exposed.

Misconception in this matter of beauty derives mostly from the 
fact that all day long we are surrounded by natural, physical, 
intelligible things which, either favourably or adversely, are 
related to it. All the time we are picking out the agreeable and 
rejecting the disagreeable. Experiencing beauty at many different 
levels and in many different departments, we assume not only that 
the same rules can be applied indiscriminately but that we are 
free to make up the rules according to the dominant impression. 
We refer the data provided by one lot of perceptions to reactions 
which are stirred by a quite different lot of stimuli. Our guide 
is instinctively our own experience, the validity of which is 
measured by either the clarity or the intensity of the impression 
which it leaves behind.

We are apt, therefore, to judge works of art not by anything 
intrinsic to the works themselves but by the effects which they 
have on us. If the effects were always according to right reason, 
this system of judging would be fair enough. But since this is 
not normally the case, we tend to judge works of art by our 
favourite emotion, our acutest perception, our vividest memory. 
Thus we admire a statue because it reminds us of the crib at 
home, because it looks like someone we know, because it fits 
nicely into that awkward space, because it does not break when we 
knock it over. The only way to approach art is to approach it in 
its own terms, and in its own essential terms--as related to 
essential beauty.

Just as intellectual beauty differs from physical beauty, as 
infant differs from adult and as spiritual differs from moral, so 
artistic beauty differs from natural or any other beauty. And 
until all terrestrial beauty finds its realization in eternal 
beauty, each separate beauty has its own separate laws. What all 
this is leading up to is that it is no good applying the laws of 
natural beauty to works which take their stand on sculptural 
beauty.

Not only is each order of creation governed by its own laws of 
beauty, but each order of art is governed by its own laws of 
beauty. The principles of the ballet may not be imposed upon 
straight acting, the principles of the film may not be imposed 
upon the puppet-show--still less upon painting and carving. This 
is something which is not infrequently forgotten, even by the 
artists themselves.

When an art-form neglects its proper laws, it loses its sense of 
material: it tends to imitate the expressions not only of nature 
but of other art-forms. Thus it will be considered an achievement 
when a piano is made to reproduce the sound of drops of rain upon 
a metal roof, when an organ can convey the twittering of birds 
(or the sighing of wind in the trees or a carillon of bells), 
when a flute brings out the notes which you would have thought 
could be rendered only by a double-bass. It is significant that 
when the violin was found capable of imitating exactly the sound 
of sawing wood, the carpenter's saw was found hardly less capable 
of imitating the violin. This is called the law of aesthetic 
retaliation.

Nor, in this matter of judging art's proper beauty, is St. Thomas 
much help. When he says of created beauty that it is "that which 
gives pleasure on sight,"[1] he is felt to be begging the question. 
His, as M. Maritain points out, is a determination by effect. 
What we want determined for us is not so much the effect as the 
essence and the immediate cause. But it must be remembered that 
St. Thomas's words were not intended to be a definition; they 
were more in the nature of an aside. St. Thomas was anyway not 
greatly concerned with art--nowhere among his writings can be 
found a reference to a painting or a carving--so was simply 
stating the consequence of "conformity to that which should be." 
For the same reason, namely that the consequences are found to 
register differently in different people, we can never hope to 
find a cut-and-dried documentary formula which will put us right 
for good in our aesthetic appreciation. There are plenty to 
choose from,[2] but none gets us much nearer than Aeschylus's 
chorus in the Agamemnon, "my intestines do not lie" ("splagchna 
d'ohuti matazei"). The trouble about intestines is that they 
often do lie, especially when dictated to by the emotions.

While instinctive taste may take a man far on the way in the 
assessment of works of art, it cannot take him all the way. What 
is there to prove that his taste is right? It frequently happens 
that the intuitive appreciation is, in the light of certain 
objective canons, proved to have been justified. But in the 
valuation of aesthetic significance there must be more than the 
"Einfuhlungsheit"[3] which an occasional success has verified. If 
there is to be insight into the content of the work of art, if 
the importance of the work is to be measured according to the 
absolute standard proposed above, there must be principle in the 
approach. Even the principle of rejecting false principles of 
approach is something.


							ii

The false approach most commonly employed is of course that of 
wanting works of art to resemble works of nature. It is certainly 
true that some of the work done both in stone and bronze by the 
greatest masters--Donatello, Michelangelo, Rodin, Mestrovic--has 
been naturalistic, but it is not because such work resembled 
nature that it was good sculpture. Not only did those particular 
objects possess other more important qualities besides that of 
naturalism but those particular masters produced other works 
which were not naturalistic. Naturalism by itself is no proof of 
excellence in a carving. More often than not it is a distinct 
handicap, distracting from the main intimation.[4]

Art may be taught of nature, "natura artis magistra," but this 
does not mean that the pupil must look like the master. In the 
Christian sculpture of the fourteenth century nature was 
replacing the symbol. Until then, nature had been the index to be 
looked up when carving got stuck; the idea that likeness should 
be the main concern would have surprised the sculptors of the 
earlier schools. When the humanists, with their novel 
interpretation of reality, put nature in the first place, the 
symbolists went virtually out of business. But where you have a 
new concept of reality you have to invent new symbols to express 
it. So the idea of the symbol never quite went out.

For the sculptor who has undertaken to carve or model a portrait 
there is clearly an obligation to aim at some sort of likeness. 
But portraiture is only a branch, and a small branch, of carving; 
and even here the stone face is not meant to resemble absolutely 
the face of flesh and blood. The character of the stone or clay 
has to be expressed as well as the character of the sitter. The 
sitter's individuality will to a certain extent be expressed, 
unless the portrait is no more than a photograph in relief, by 
symbols.

On plate IV there appears what is meant to be a carpenter's saw. 
It will be seen to have the structure of an ordinary saw but the 
character of a stone saw. That is to say, it is the symbol of a 
saw conveyed in the medium of stone. (The question here is not 
whether it is well or badly done, but simply what it is.) Thus 
its serrated edge is meant to repeat the rhythm of the beard; its 
flat surface is meant to act as a wall keeping the rather loose 
figure compact and within bounds; its pronounced handle is meant 
to support the line of the hand. The saw is not designed to cut 
wood or make the sound of a violin.

The critic who complains "Why try to improve on nature?" has 
failed to grasp that between nature and sculpture there is no 
question of competition. The functions of each are entirely 
separate, and are connected not substantively but analogically. 
When God made man of flesh and blood he had in mind the range of 
activities, physical, intellectual, social and spiritual, which 
the human race would have to perform. A man would have to dig, 
build, raise a family, ride, write letters and ultimately fit 
bits of machinery together. The plan of man's body was designed 
to act humanly. But when a sculptor makes a man of stone he is 
presented with a quite different range of demand. The carved man 
has nothing to do in the way of human action so can be designed 
sculpturally. The carved man is primarily a symbol. All he has to 
do is to represent.

A carving is thus a re-presentation, a presentation anew, of 
something which may or may not bear resemblance to the original 
as presented by nature. There is all the difference between re-
producing in a new mode of creative activity and reproducing 
likenesses to what has already been created. Where the former 
exercise considers the ideal, the divinely planned type, the 
latter exercise considers the actual examples resulting in the 
created order from the divine type. It is a question of 
orientation, and whenever sculpture is orientated towards realism 
it loses its sense of reality.

So the distinction has to be made in sculpture between what is 
real and what is realistic. Real sculpture need not be realistic, 
and realistic sculpture need not be real. What is known as 
"realism," "naturalism," "representationalism" is a danger to 
true sculpture in the measure that it demands the sacrifice of 
intrinsic to extrinsic values. Wherever sculpture's substantive 
good is replaced by an accidental good, you may get an advance in 
technological perfection, but you get a setback in Christian 
carving.

Realism, moreover, when carried beyond a certain point, defeats 
its own end. Representational sculpture, by inviting direct 
comparison with the object as found in nature, must inevitably be 
seen to fall short of nature's standards. The more idealized and 
symbolical the carving, the less is it likely to be held up 
against the natural type. Grinling Gibbons did no service to 
representational art, or to any other for the matter of that, 
when he carved vine leaves so delicately that, when painted and 
mounted on little hidden springs which caused them to rise and 
fall at a puff of wind, they were mistaken for real leaves. This 
was artistry, not art. There is not much difference between 
artistry and artifice. An artificial leaf, such as the factory-
made plastic variety which carries likeness to its extreme limit, 
is in self-conscious rivalry with the real leaf. The standard is 
too high: most would agree that nature's leaf is really better.

If Romanesque and Gothic carvers had wanted to copy what they 
saw, they had the skill to do so. They could have made marble 
drapery look like silk and ivory wings look like feathers. But it 
was not what they wanted to do. Instead they looked hard at 
drapery and the wings of birds, and then interpreted what they 
saw. By a process of abstraction and sculptural calculation they 
found a convention for dealing with what they saw. Then they 
forgot about what they had seen and went to work on the new 
expression.

"Ars imitatur naturam in sua operatione," says St. Thomas:[5] "art 
copies nature by working as nature works", not by copying the 
works of nature. Whenever art steps outside its own proper way of 
working, it falls into the error either of artistry, of artifice, 
or even of anarchy. If art is, according to Rouault's definition, 
"the conformity of the sensible world with a certain interior 
light," it follows that where one or other--either the sensible 
world or the interior light--refuses to conform, the result is a 
negation of art. Take the sensible world as your final arbiter, 
and what happens? Your "certain interior light" clouds over and 
you get nothing but realism. Take the interior light as your 
final arbiter, and what happens? The "sensible world" recedes 
until you reach the impasse of abstraction. For true art there 
has to be conformity, equilibrium.

So between art, which is right relationship, and anarchy, which 
is its opposite, you find all those artistic substitutes which 
come about because the interior light is not quite strong enough 
to reveal the beauty of the sensible world, and because the 
manipulative ability is present to reproduce accurately the 
limited beauty which is seen. For example, our twentieth-century 
cult of eccentricity is a dangerous artistic substitute. The 
nineteenth-century cult of classicism was a dangerous substitute 
for an art which had lost its way in the emotion of Romanticism 
and the chic of Rococo. But perhaps more harmful to the course of 
true sculpture than these cults is the perennial cult of 
prettiness.

Cultivated ugliness in sculpture is bad enough, but cultivated 
prettiness is almost worse. Prettiness, just as truly as 
ugliness, is the enemy of the beautiful. In "L'Art," Rodin 
describes how a great artist can pick up what the world calls 
ugly and turn it into something beautiful. To the great artist 
perhaps nothing is seen as wholly ugly. Certainly to pick up what 
is pretty and turn it into something beautiful requires genius. 
Donatello managed it. Michelangelo obviously never tried: the 
pretty did not interest him. The pretty must have appealed to 
Della Robbia because it appears in most of his work, and he seems 
to have made no attempt to transform it. There was undoubtedly 
much prettiness in the subjects chosen by the Flemish artists, 
who, in their best period, transformed it into beauty. The French 
often rose from the pretty to the beautiful--more in their Gothic 
than in their later styles--but just as often remained pledged to 
prettiness. The famous eighteenth-century French sculptor Houdon, 
looked up to even by Rodin, appears to have been undecided as to 
what was pretty and what was beautiful. He would carve in the 
strong and model in the weak, attracted mainly by the 
commonplace--which he rendered with great fidelity. But Houdon's 
work is always interesting, if only because it stands out from 
that of his contemporaries, who must have been dancing-masters. 
In our own time, Rosandic, master of technique and composition, 
has shown himself (witness his "La Pucelle") to be the supreme 
exponent of sculptured prettiness.

So far as England is concerned, it is difficult to generalize on 
this point: English carving has apparently framed no policy. For 
Gill, at any rate, surface charm had no meaning whatever: never 
has there been a sculptor who made fewer concessions. Epstein, 
who can with equal facility turn ugly things into beautiful and 
beautiful into ugly, quotes Modigliani as calling the sculptor of 
skin-deep loveliness "un faiseur de beaute."

Especially in religious carving must the quality of 
attractiveness be backed by qualities more authentic. The critic 
as well as the sculptor should know that the kind of good looks 
which are admired on the stage are not the kind of good looks 
which are to be expected from the stone. If the fairness of a 
celebrated beauty is not the fairness of a carved Venus, still 
less is it the fairness of a carved saint. Again it is the 
fallacy of "likeness"--likeness to a type extrinsic to the proper 
craft. The first thing a stone beauty has to look like is stone.


							iii

We have reached this far in our examination of appreciation: we 
know that when a man's first thought on seeing a work of 
sculpture is "How cleverly contrived" or "How enchanting" he is 
either not in the presence of true sculpture or else not looking 
for the right thing. It is not the function of sculpture to 
elicit speculation upon the method employed, the materials used, 
the identity of the artist. It is not the function of sculpture 
to elicit gasps of surprise, wa