He
is essentially the artist--the artificer of beauty--ever bent on the
making of a lovely and significant thing; and the study of nature and
the resources of his craft are but tools and are never allowed to become
anything more.
If, then, the accusation that Saint-Gaudens's art is not sculptural
means that he was a designer rather than a modeller, that he cared for
composition more than for representation, that the ensemble interested
him more than the details, I would cheerfully admit that the accusation
is well founded. Such marvels of rendering as Rodin could give us,
before he lost himself in the effort to deserve that reputation as a
profound thinker which has been thrust upon him, were not for
Saint-Gaudens. The modelling of the _morceau_ was not particularly his
affair. The discrimination of hard and soft, of bone and muscle and
integument, the expression of tension where a fleshy tissue is tightly
drawn over the framework beneath, or of weight where it falls away from
it--these were not the things that most compelled his interest or in
which he was most successful. For the human figure as a figure, for the
inherent beauty of its marvellous mechanism, he did not greatly care.
The problems of bulk and mass and weight and movement which have
occupied sculptors from the beginning were not especially his problems.
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