But, apart from the work of these two men, a the essential value
of a work of sculpture is by no means always equal to its technical and
scientific completeness. There are archaic statues that are almost as
nobly beautiful as any work by Phidias and more beautiful than almost
any work that has been done since his time. There are bits of Gothic
sculpture that are more valuable expressions of human feeling than
anything produced by the contemporaries of Buonarroti. Even in times of
decadence a great artist has created finer things than could be
accomplished by a mediocre talent of the great epochs, and the world
could ill spare the Victory of Samothrace or the portrait busts of
Houdon.
As sculpture is one of the simplest of the arts, painting is one of the
most complicated. The harmonies it constructs are composed of almost
innumerable elements of lines and forms and colors and degrees of
light and dark, and the science it professes is no less than that of the
visible aspect of the whole of nature--a science so vast that it never
has been and perhaps never can be mastered in its totality. Anything
approaching a complete art of painting can exist only in an advanced
stage of civilization. An entirely complete art of painting never has
existed and probably never will exist.
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