Page:Studies in the history of the renaissance (IA studiesinhistor01pategoog).djvu/204

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182
THE RENAISSANCE.
viii.

for ever only fleet and serpentining, and white and red—not white and red as in Francia's 'Golgotha.' Let us not say, would that that unperplexed youth of humanity, seeing itself and satisfied, had never passed into a mournful maturity; for already the deep joy was in store for the spirit of finding the ideal of that youth still red with life in its grave.

It followed that the Greek ideal expressed itself pre-eminently in sculpture. All art has a sensuous element, colour, form, sound—in poetry a dexterous recalling of these together with the profound joyful sensuousness of motion; each of these may be a medium for the ideal; it is partly accident which in any individual case makes the born artist, poet or painter rather than sculptor. But as the mind itself has had an historical development, one form of art, by the very limitations of its material, may be more adequate than another for the expression of any one phase of its experience. Different attitudes of the imagination have a native affinity with different types of sensuous form, so that they combine easily and entirely. The arts may thus be ranged in a series which corresponds to a series of developments in the human mind itself[1]. Architecture, which begins in a practical need, can only express by vague

  1. Hegel, Aesthetik, Theil. ii. Einleitung.