Pure sculpture, as the
ancients understood it, the art of form _per se_, demands the nude
figure, or a costume which reveals it rather than hides it. The costume
of to-day reveals as little of the figure as possible, and, unlike
mediaeval armor, it has no beauty of its own. A painter may make it
interesting by dwelling on color or tone or texture, or may so lose it
in shadow that it ceases to count at all except as a space of darkness.
A sculptor can do none of these things, and if he is to make it serve
the ends of beauty he has need of all the resourcefulness and all the
skill of the master of low relief. It was fortunate that the artist
whose greatest task was to commemorate the heroes of the Civil War
should have had the temperament and the training of such a master, and I
know of no other sculptor than Saint-Gaudens who has so magnificently
succeeded in the rendering of modern clothing--no other who could have
made the uniform of Farragut or the frock coat of Lincoln as interesting
as the armor of Colleone or the toga of Augustus.
[Illustration: Copyright, De W.C. Ward.
Plate 26.--Saint-Gaudens. "Sarah Redwood Lee."]
But if the genius of Saint-Gaudens was primarily a decorative genius--if
it was, even, in his earlier work, a trifle picturesque, so that, as he
said himself, he had "to fight against picturesqueness," his work was
never pictorial.
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