the same time, he worked out several plans for a monument in honour of the famous actress Hanna Kvapilová. Although modern costume hardly lends itself to plastic arrangement, Štursa has moulded the marble in such masterly fashion that the whole appears admirably welded together, instinct with life through the high internal tension, yet in such a way that the airy, delicate beauty of the actress and of her art is fully rendered. A third order of this period, the groups that decorate the pylons in front of the Hlávka Bridge in Prague, are two clusters of human figures linked by a powerful harmony, which worthily crown the architectural conception of the bridge. Unflagging study of plastic problems led Štursa to experiments in which an extreme simplification of mass-effects is combined with an entirely abstract rhythm of human groupings: thus, in the bas-reliefs of the Mánes Bridge, the chisel has followed a broken, almost geometrical line. But from this transient phase the artist soon returned to Nature, and has since attempted to read the inmost secrets of her organism. Called up for active service at the outbreak of the war, he came back to his work radically changed, so that the war has divided his art into two distinct periods. His present period offers a deeper, more tragic and more dramatic conception of life and humanity. We see this in the “Wounded Soldier,” as he falls, shot through the head. In this touching little bronze figure, the sculptor, profoundly impressed as an eye-witness by this incident of war, has caught the fleeting movement with a bold and vigorous hand. The portrait of the painter Švabinský is a work of remarkable insight, and the female figure entitled, “The Gifts of Heaven and Earth” is a creation full of life, the warmth of the blood making itself felt through the velvety suppleness of the form. Thus in Štursa’s work life has once more begun to speak in deeper, intenser, more penetrating accents.
