The whole scale of relief was altered in the course of the work, after
it had once been nearly completed, and the mastery of the infinitely
complicated problem of relief in many degrees is supreme. But all the
more because the scheme was so full and so varied, the artist has
carefully avoided the pictorial in his treatment. There is no
perspective, the figures being all on the same scale, and there is no
background, no setting of houses or landscape. Everywhere, between and
above the figures, is the flat surface which is the immemorial tradition
of sculpture in relief; and the fact that it _is_ a surface,
representing nothing, is made more clear by the inscription written upon
it--an inscription placed there, consciously or unconsciously, that it
might have that very effect. The composition is magnificent, whether for
its intrinsic beauty of arrangement--its balancing of lines and
spaces--or for its perfect expressiveness. The rhythmic step of marching
men is perfectly rendered, and the guns fill the middle of the panel in
an admirable pattern, without confusion or monotony. The heads are
superb in characterization, strikingly varied and individual, yet each a
strongly marked racial type, unmistakably African in all its forms.
[Illustration: Plate 29.--Saint-Gaudens.
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