Against this tendency to the hard
presentment of mere form trying vainly to compete with the reality of
nature itself, all noble sculpture constantly struggles: each great
system of sculpture resisting it in its own way, etherealising,
spiritualising, relieving its hardness, its heaviness and death. The use
of colour in sculpture is but an unskilful contrivance to effect, by
borrowing from another art, what the nobler sculpture effects by
strictly appropriate means. To get not colour, but the equivalent of
colour; to secure the expression and the play of life; to expand the too
fixed individuality of pure, unrelieved, uncoloured form--this is the
problem which the three great styles in sculpture have solved in three
different ways.
Allgemeinheit--breadth, generality, universality--is the word chosen by
Winckelmann, and after him by Goethe and many German critics, to express
that law of the most excellent Greek sculptors, of Pheidias and his
pupils, which prompted them constantly to seek the type in the
individual, to abstract and express only what is structural and
permanent, to purge from the individual all that belongs only to him,
all the accidents, the feelings, and actions of the special moment, all
that (because in its own nature it endures but for a moment) is apt to
look like a frozen thing if one arrests it.
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