Page:Woman in Art.djvu/67

WOMAN IN ART prolific thought when he introduced them as art motif, for contrast and historic significance between Prophets of the Most High and Sibyls of pagan people, such as called in vain upon Baal, while Elijah and Israel listened.

Whether painted from models or resultant of his ideal, who can tell? The Cumæan Sibyl represents Wisdom. One feels that she could not have been an ordinary type, but a woman of rugged experience, of body and mind grown strong by use. Wisdom has developed from thought—was it her thought, or that of the artist?

The work of the master was massive, proportionate to his shape of mind which seems not to have been able to produce lesser ideals.

As we are speaking of form, we recall an ideal of another robust mind of nearly five hundred years later. Greek and Roman criterions are the same, studied and imitated by many modern men, but in France there has been but one Rodin—one man who has dared to express his thought in his own way. He has worked out an ideal with much power and originality, and it serves well as an illustration. He has called it "The Hand of God." A powerful hand, perfect in proportion and form, reaches up from a great block of native stone, holding within its upturned palm a mass of formless clay, from which emerges the exquisite figures of the first man and the first woman, the form of the woman being dominant. Studying the form from various angles, the wonder and beauty of the idea grows.

Art springs from a broadcast sowing, and in America, contemporaneous with Rodin in France, we had a St. Gaudens whose work has powerfully and delicately idealized life, and with wonderful skill and imagination has portrayed the subjective.

In the figure of a woman the artist has embodied "Grief." The severely simple figure, exhausted with grief, sits leaning against the granite tomb, the hand supporting the head that would otherwise droop with its weight of woe. She is alone with her grief amid the evergreens that form a shelter for those who are sleeping their last sleep. The spirit, the idea, the environment, are in absolute harmony.

We realize that the setting forth of the subjective impersonated by the beauty and grace of woman has developed a more wonderfully symbolic art than any before known.

Let us note a remarkable example of idealized objective, portrayed in woman's form, though far removed from the human.

In the material of marble, hard, cold, and spotless, Randolph Rogers of the 47