Page:Studies in the history of the renaissance (IA studiesinhistor01pategoog).djvu/212

190 ever kept in reserve, which is very seldom committed to any definite action. Endless as are the attitudes of Greek sculpture, exquisite as is the invention of the Greeks in this direction, the actions or situations it permits are simple and few. There is no Greek Madonna; the goddesses are always childless. The actions selected are those which would be without significance, except in a divine person, binding on a sandal or preparing for the bath. When a more complex and significant action is permitted, it is most often represented as just finished, so that eager expectancy is excluded, as Apollo just after the slaughter of the Python, or Venus with the apple of Paris already in her hand. The Laocoon, with all that patient science through which it has triumphed over an almost unmanageable subject, marks a period in which sculpture has begun to aim at effects legitimate only in painting. The hair, so rich a source of expression in painting, and, as we have lately seen, in poetry, because relatively to the eye or to the lip it is mere drapery, is withdrawn from attention; its texture, as well as its colour, is lost, its arrangement faintly and severely indicated, with no enmeshed or broken light. The eyes are wide and directionless, not fixing anything with their gaze, nor rivetting the brain to any special external object; the brows without hair. It deals almost