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: to imitate living creatures, and to reproduce his own im: e. " After admiring the universe," says M. Charles Blanc, " man began to contemplate him- Fig. I.—Stone Age. self; he realised that the human form is adapted to the spirit, that it is, so to speak, its clothing ; that its proportions, its symmetry, its ease of motion, its superior beauty, render it alone, of all living forms, capable of fully manifesting thought. Fig. 2.—Stone Age. Therefore he copies the human body, and sculpture is born." We add : from this moment it may be called statuary. But as the human mind requiredthe gradual training of ages before painting produced what we call a picture, so a long period of actual and mature civilization was needed before sculpture, freed from its vassalage to architecture, could bring forth those independent works which we name bas-reliels and statues. CHAPTER I EGYPTIAN SCULPTURE. FAR back in that remote and primitive civilization which witnessed the birth and growth of the fertile Nile, we must look for the origin of all the arts. The Egyptians excavated the sepulchres of Samoun and the temple of Karnak from the rocks, and raised the great pyramids of Djizeh (Geezeh) on the borders of the desert; they engraved epitaphs on stelae or tablets ; they placed rows of sphinxes resting on pedestals in the avenues of the temples which contained the images of their gods and all but deified Pharaohs. Until the present day it was not unreasonably believed that Egyptian art under the influence of the priesthood, or rather, practised by the priests alone—who had arrested its progress by condemning it to the limits of an unchangeable law, and placing it under the restrictions of religion— must have been purely sacerdotal from its originand early development to its total ...