Page:Studies in the history of the renaissance (IA studiesinhistor01pategoog).djvu/77

Rh by borrowing from another art what the nobler sculpture effects by strictly appropriate means. To get not colour, but the equivalent of colour, to secure the expression and the play of life; to expand the too fixed individuality of pure unrelieved uncoloured form,—this is the problem which the three great styles in sculpture have solved in three different ways.

Allgemeinheit—breadth, generality, universality—is the word chosen by Winckelmann, and after him by Goethe and many German critics, to express that law of the most excellent Greek sculptors, of Phidias and his pupils, which prompted them constantly to seek the type in the individual, to purge from the individual all that belongs only to the individual, all the accidents, feelings, actions of a special moment, all that in its nature enduring for a moment looks like a frozen thing if you arrest it, to abstract and express only what is permanent, structural, abiding.

In this way their works came to be like some subtle extract or essence, or almost like pure thoughts or ideas; and hence that broad humanity in them, that detachment from the conditions of a particular place or people, which has carried their influence far beyond the age which produced them, and insured them universal acceptance.

That was the Greek way of relieving the hardness