This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1906 edition. Excerpt: ... tuscan sculpture Greek painting exists for us only in tradition, or in a few belated fragments; therefore we shall never know how it would have borne comparison with Greek sculpture. In Greece, as everywhere else, the plastic method was the first to arrive at excellence because, quite naturally, it was the first to take the fancy of the neophyte in art. The plastic process, so simple and direct, has in every land been the first to commend itself to the shepherd or herdsman when the desire came upon him to fashion out of a bit of wood or stone or a lump of clay something in the likeness of a familiar object. Painting (apart from polychrome wall-decoration and the colouring of images) was only undertaken after society had made a considerable advance. Colour and shadow, aerial perspective and composition, could only come after a long course of experiment and instruction, and it was no easy task to present to the eye on a flat surface an effect equivalent to that which the carver was able to produce by his shapen mass. In Italy, under the Empire, painting and sculpture had both been brought to considerable perfection, and both were practically extinguished by the barbarian irruption. When at the opening of the twelfth century there were signs of a permanent revival--apart from mere Byzantine reproductions--it could hardly have been maintained that Italy was virgin soil upon which sculpture would naturally and necessarily enjoy a long start in the race; in such a milieu it might well have happened that the two forms of art should advance, pari passu, on the upward path of progress and development; indeed, considering their relative position in the Byzantine Empire, whence came so much of the teaching and spirit prior to the Italian revival,...