The appreciation of sculpture - 1904 Author:Russell Sturgis Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III THE ROMAN EMPIRE AND EARLY EGYPT It is notable to a modern student who spends much time in the museums of Europe, that the evidence before him ... more »points unmistakably to a very great production of sculpture during the centuries of classical civilization. There must have been an enormous amount of it produced, relatively to other industries, and relatively to the population, even in poor and unsettled Greece ; but under the vast administration of the Roman Empire the relative proportion was perhaps increased, while the actual amount became at once incalculably great. What we see in the long galleries of the Vatican are mainly Roman copies of secondary merit", and such imitative pieces as were sculptured by thousands to adorn gardens and public promenades, where they count for little more than do the statues set upon the pinnacles of Milan Cathedral—well out of sight unless you climb to the roof, and even then marred for the student by the brilliant sky behind them. The evident and, indeed, natural indifference to the merit of these thousands of decorative pieces is a thing to keep in mind. Writers have said that there was a larger population of statues in the Rome of Trajan's time than there was a living population : but we will note that the examples which we have by the thousand, either in the Chiaramonti Museum or the cold white galleries of Naples, such as were set about the forums and under the roofed porticoes, are works which we do not care very much about. The effect of such a prodigious production of inferior work was not, however, bad for the contemporaneous production of the finest work. It is not an evil, but a good, that ten thousand marble-cutters in the Mediterranean world were turning out, each ten statues a year : that was clear gain, because it gave ...« less