Identifier: appreciationofsc00stur (find matches)
Title: Appreciation of sculpture; a handbook by Russell Sturgis ...
Year: 1904 (1900s)
Authors: Sturgis, Russell
Subjects: Sculpture
Publisher: The Baker
Contributing Library: Whitney Museum of American Art, Frances Mulhall Achilles Library
Digitizing Sponsor: Metropolitan New York Library Council - METRO

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y thesubstitution of the foreign set of thoughts,for those which appertain to sculpture alone.It is, as has been said, more easy to judgeof the sculptors own work when there isthe simplest, even the barest set of thoughtsof non-artistic character. Let us consider,then, the strange phenomenon of thenineteenth century, the appearance of beastsculpture and bird sculpture as the principalsubjects for really monumental works ofart. Art has always known the beast ofchase and the beast of prey as a part ofhuman sculpture. The herdsman needshis oxen, the hunter his stags and all therest of it, but rarely has it been the casethat sculpture has dealt with the bull, thehorse, the elephant as the prime subjects ofits work. Antiquity knew such sculptureas this, a fact which has been revealed to usby the excavations at Herculaneum and atPompeii, and which is recorded for us inthe bronze collection at the Naples Museum ;but we know little of how the horses andstags at Herculaneum were set up in(148)
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Recent Art, Part I, Form place ; and it really was a bold thing forBarye to fill the middle of the nineteenthcentury with his struggling and prowlingbeasts of prey—works which he alternatedwith highly classical groups of athletes andcentaurs. Nor was Barye left long alone inthis pursuit. The ferocious creatures ofAuguste-Nicolas Cain succeeded them, andAvent even a step farther in realism as wellas in the size and monumental importanceof the pieces. Thus the lion and lioness(Plate XXXVIII), concerned with the car-cass of a boar which the lion proposes tohave to himself until he has had his fill,form a group of great dignity in spite of thevigorous action w^hich it suggests. Suchaction is carried farther in other pieces, andthere are those groups of the great catswhich are repulsive in their torturingstruggles, the violent deaths which theyare about to die, their ferocity, their greed.It is a side of nature to be ignored whenone is not compelled to face it, and in artone is never com

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