Page:Studies in the history of the renaissance (IA studiesinhistor01pategoog).djvu/206

184 external form that which is most inward in humour, passion, sentiment. Between architecture and the romantic arts of painting, music, and poetry, is sculpture, which, unlike architecture, deals immediately with man, while it contrasts with the romantic arts, because it is not self-analytical. It deals more exclusively than any other art with the human form, itself one entire medium of spiritual expression, trembling, blushing, melting into dew with inward excitement. That spirituality which only lurks about architecture as a volatile effect, in sculpture takes up the whole given material and penetrates it with an imaginative motive; and at first sight sculpture, with its solidity of form, seems more real and full than the faint abstract manner of poetry or painting. Still the fact is the reverse. Discourse and action show man as he is more directly than the springing of the muscles and the moulding of the flesh; and these poetry commands. Painting, by the flushing of colour in the face and dilatation of light in the eye, and music by its subtle range of tones, can refine most delicately upon a single moment of passion, unravelling its finest threads.

But why should sculpture thus limit itself to pure form? Because by this limitation it becomes a perfect medium of expression for one peculiar motive of the imaginative intellect. It therefore renounces