in Ancient and Modern Art. 95 to give grandeur; and that the eye must be gratified with a variety of colours— when he is told this, with certain ani^ mating words of spirit, dignity, energy, grace, greatness of style, and brilliancy of tints, he becomes suddenly vain of his newly acquired knowledge and never thinks he can carry those rules too far/^ To this process, ripened into man- nerism, we owe the lengthened limbs and contorted attitudes of Parmegianino, the academical display of muscles of the Florentines, and the exaggerated passion of the French school. Such I take to be the nature of affectation in art ; and it is far less easy to say why the ancients were entirely free from it, then to assign some of the reasons why modern works are so generally tainted with it; and this lighter task is all I shall attempt. Through long and distinct periods of history different arts have predominated and given a tone to the others. In Egypt sculpture never ceased to bear the impress of archi- tectural character and symmetry; and the political and re- ligious institutions of that singular people contributed not a little to preserve it from change. On the other hand when we look to Greece this is no longer the case ; and, though the one is always essential to the perfection of the other, yet sculpture existed free and independent. She exercised how- ever a similar though less rigid sway there over her younger sister. Painting, who followed her as well in manner as in time. If again we consider their relation in modern ages^, we shall find this latter art predominant, and exerting an in- fluence as powerful and more mischievous than she herself had previously submitted to. All this is sufficiently ob- vious. The Memnon or the Sphinx are almost as much buildings as statues ; and the Aldobrandini marriage with its single succession of detached^ figures is a basrelief in 3 The analogy of the literature of the ancients and moderns is so close that mutatis mutandis whatever is said of the so called imitative arts may be applied to it : but this is beyond my subject, and has been developed already by one far more compe- tent to the task.
- It is singular that even in cases where the height above the eye and the object
of the work require particular distinctness, this principle has so often been violated by the moderns in sculpture. In 1829 there was an exhibition in Paris of a number of
