The different works in relief which liave been pre- served to us from the early Christian period all resem- ble each other in character in the fact that they ignore the peculiar demands of the plastic art as completely as do the representations in color in the art of painting. Both arts were treated in the same spirit and style — a
style that was neither picturesque noi plastic, that did not aim at an ori^anic blending of the diverse elements, nor yet at a mo(hficaiion of the antagonizing principles, but simply at a mechanical combination of the two by seizing on certain elements from either side and disre- garding others— specifically the early Christian style. The two arts went hand in hand in the further develop- ment of this method; but sculpture appears to have fallen into a decline earlier than painting, since it would seem that only sculptures in stone were executed in It- aly as early as the 7th century, and that all work in bronze was obtained from Constantinople. In Byzan- tium, too, the compromise of the council of 787, by which the Iconoclast controversy was brought to a close, hastened the decline of the art of sculpture by providing that only paintings and reliefs should be al- lowed in the churches, and that all statuary should be rigidly excluded.
The Middle-age. style differs from that of the pre- ceding period in that it no longer aims at a mechan- ical combination of the plastic and the picturesque, but executes all sculptures directly in the sjiirit and method peculiar to the painter's art. It therefore be- comes as picturesque as the architecture of that age, and, like painting, dependent on it. But the further development of tliis style led sculptors involuntarily to a mode of apprehension and execution more in harmony with the special laws of their art, and thus gave rise to the Romanesque in sculpture, which starts out with the traditional old Christian types, but en- deavors to impart to them more soul and feeling, and also a more natural form. The aim was not realized at once, but the effort to achieve it gave to the work accomplished something of that plastic character which early Christian art had so persistently perverted and ultimately wiped out. There are in Germany (on the so-called golden gate of the calhedral at Freiberg, in Saxony, and on the pulpit and altar of the church at Wechselburg) magnificent sculptures of this period, whose plastic beauty recalls to mind the masterpieces of antiquity. It is significant that Nicolo Pisano (about 1230), called the father of Italian sculpture, and, at all events, the leading sculptor of the Romanesque school in Italy, suddenly turned away from the old Christian (Byzantine) types and devoted himself to the study of the monuments of antiquity, at least with reference to form and apparel. The Romanesque style, however, was too much an exotic, and did not sufficiently reflect the ideas and tendencies of the Middle Ages to endure. The Gothic took its place, and with it came in a new aera, inasmuch as both painting and sculpture turned di- rectly to nature and to the actual world for their ideals. Figures in relief or in statues obtained greater individ- uality thereby, though beauty of form was entirely dis- regarded, and all emphasis was laid on adequate expres- sion of the inner life. The plastic cliaracter of the sculptor's works was, of course, sacrificed by this meth- od, and it was only natural that the aid of colors should be called in to transform all figures into statuary paint- ings; but as the Gothic style aimed primarily to ex- press the fundamental truths of the Christian philoso- phy of the world and of the Christian moral life, and employed natural forms only as the vehicle of such expression, it was readily led to attach importance, in the end, to such beauly of physical form as would ade- quateh' represent the beauty of soul m which the ideal of its aspirations had been unified. The picturesque was, in consequence, so greally modified in many of the later productions of this style that the OBSthctical im- pression does not suffer in any way.
The third and most flourishing period in the history of Christian art is characterized bv the conscious effort to bring works of art into thorough harmony with the forms and jirinciples of growth in nature, and with the conditions and re(piirenicnts of art in general, and of every branch of art in partictdar, so that, independent- ly of tradition and the Church, it may represent the
SCULPTURE
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SCUOPHYLACIUM
Christian ideal with artistic freedom and with adequate beauty of form. Sculptors now sought to reconcile the Christian idea with the requirements of their art, spe- cial attention beint; given to works in relief and to a combination of high with low reliefs in their represen- tations, as being most likely to secure the end in view. We can do little more in this place than mention a few of the more successful artists.
In Italy, the celebrated Lorenzo (Jhiberti (born at Florence about 1380, died after 1455), one of the great- est masters of Christian sculpture, deserves special men- tion, as does also his talented rival, t)<inato di Betto Bardi (1383-1466), called Donatello, and Luca della Rob- bia(1440-81).and several other Venetian artists. At the beginning of the 16th century a number of masters ap- peared by the side of Leonardo da Vinci — the Horentines (iiovanni Francesco Rnstici and Andrea Contucci, and the Venetian Alonzo Lombardi — who succeeded in lion- oring the iilealism of Christianity, and also in doing jus- tice to the claims of realism to natural and living rep- resentation in sculpture. Their works fall below the greatest masterpieces in painting by Raphael only as they are unable to represent the transcendental side of Christianity, the transformation of the human into the divine, with equal clearness. Michael Angelo Buona- rotti, however, soon displaced these masters in sculpt- ure by the success he secured in his strivings after the grand, overpowering, and extraordinary, in which he paid but little attention to ideal beauty of form or to the requirements of plastic art. The result was that in the middle of the 16th century Italian sculptors had adopted a style which aimed chiefly at effect, and which was marred by ostentation and mannerisms, and often governed by a coarse naturalism.